Disaster preparedness must put communities at centre

Why in the News

The catastrophe unfolding across Nepal is being read as a warning for the Himalaya and for mountain regions worldwide rather than as one country’s disaster. The reading rests on field research with disaster-affected communities in Nepal, including flood-affected elders, women, men and local leaders in Kharapani in the Pokhara Valley after the Seti River flood, and on separate field research on earthquake recovery in Kathmandu. Those communities reported inadequate warning, limited preparedness and delayed recovery support. They did not reject science or technology, and asked instead for warnings that function and for the equipment and training to act on them. The contest is between a preparedness system measured by its ability to detect the next hazard and one measured by whether the detection reaches a household with the authority and the means to move.

Why does a mountain disaster become a regional problem?

1. Mountains hold the water other regions live on: They store snow and ice, feed major rivers and sustain societies far beyond their own slopes.
2. The physical base is changing across all mountain systems: From the Hindu Kush Himalaya to the Andes, the Alps and the Rocky Mountains, warming is altering glaciers, snowpack, permafrost and water flows.
3. The consequences land downstream: Environmental change in the highlands cascades into social, economic and health crises in the plains that depend on those flows.

What did flood-affected communities report?

1. The loss was continuing rather than momentary: Residents described a long relational disaster covering the loss of relatives, homes, livestock and businesses.
2. The damage extended past property: They described grief, disrupted livelihoods and frustration with the institutions meant to respond.
3. Three failures were named: They reported inadequate warning, limited preparedness and delayed recovery support.

What do affected communities ask for?

1. Working warnings, not more instruments: Communities asked for functioning warnings, local flood-information centres, communication technologies, rescue equipment and preparedness training.
2. An unread warning protects nobody: A warning that does not reach people, is not trusted, or is disconnected from evacuation and response plans provides no protection.
3. The people at risk hold usable knowledge: Affected populations are knowledge holders and leaders in their own right, not recipients waiting for expert instruction.

What five responsibilities does mountain preparedness now carry?

1. Transboundary monitoring and data sharing: Glaciers, rivers, landslides and flood pathways cross political borders, so Nepal, India, China, Bhutan and other Himalayan countries need faster exchange of upstream observations, satellite information, river conditions and warnings. Scientific cooperation of this kind is life-saving regional infrastructure.
2. Community-centred warnings: Information must reach people in trusted languages and forms, warnings must be tested, communities must know where to go, and women, elders, youth and marginalised groups must hold meaningful authority in preparedness decisions.
3. Preparedness as a permanent public responsibility: Local information centres, evacuation plans, shelters, community response teams, health-system continuity and rescue equipment all require sustained investment rather than post-disaster allocation.
4. Ecosystem-sensitive mountain development: Roads, tourism, hydropower and mining bring benefits, and poorly planned versions of each amplify exposure to the hazard.
5. International climate responsibility: Nepal has contributed a tiny share of historical emissions and faces profound risk from a changing cryosphere, so climate finance, loss and damage support, scientific capacity and locally controlled adaptation are questions of justice rather than charity.

Challenges to community-centred disaster preparedness

1. The first responder tier is the least resourced: Panchayati Raj Institutions and urban local bodies carry the immediate response duty without matching funds, trained staff or defined roles. Eg. Relief work and maintenance of community assets sit with panchayats under the Eleventh Schedule, and States have devolved neither dedicated disaster staff nor untied funds against that entry.
   The Fix: Earmark a fixed share of the State Disaster Response Fund for village-level preparedness and train elected representatives through the National Disaster Management Authority and National Institute of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj modules.
2. Spending is tilted towards relief rather than prevention: The disaster fund architecture keeps response funds far larger than mitigation funds, so preparedness competes for the smaller pool every year. Eg. India’s mitigation funds were created only after the response funds had been operating for years, and the tilt towards relief persists.
   The Fix: Move early warning systems, retrofitting and nature-based works into the National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds with a published annual drawdown target.
3. Warnings fail at the last mile: Alerts are generated centrally and lose their audience before reaching the household, which is where the decision to move is actually taken. Eg. Real-time disaster information systems and last-mile dissemination remain uneven between States.
   The Fix: Test each warning chain through a drill that measures how many households received and acted on an alert, rather than how many messages were dispatched.
4. Himalayan hazard data stops at the border: Glacial lakes, landslide dams and river surges form upstream of national boundaries, where the agencies that will face the flood have no observation rights. Eg. The South Lhonak lake outburst flood in Sikkim in October 2023 destroyed the Teesta III dam downstream and killed dozens of people.
   The Fix: Convert existing bilateral hydrological exchanges into a standing Himalayan hazard data protocol with fixed transmission times and a named receiving authority in each country.

Conclusion

Preparedness is being judged by the wrong instrument. Detection capacity has improved across the Himalaya; the authority to act on a detection still sits several administrative tiers above the people who must move. The unresolved tension is that the tier holding the legal duty to respond holds neither the money nor the staff to prepare, and the tier holding both is too distant to run an evacuation. Whether that changes is visible in one measurable thing over the next monsoon: whether any Himalayan State publishes household-level reach data for its warning system, instead of counting alerts issued.

Disaster Management in India

1. Where the mandate sits: The Ministry of Home Affairs oversees disaster management through its Disaster Management Division, which coordinates response, relief and preparedness for natural and human-made disasters, excluding drought and epidemics.
2. A four-tier institutional structure: The National Disaster Management Authority is chaired by the Prime Minister, State Disaster Management Authorities by Chief Ministers and District Disaster Management Authorities by District Collectors, with primary responsibility resting on State governments.
3. A fund architecture with four pillars: The National and State Disaster Response Funds finance relief, and the National and State Disaster Mitigation Funds finance risk-reduction projects.
4. How resilience is defined: The Hyogo Framework for Action, 2005, defines disaster resilience as the capacity of a system or community exposed to hazards to adapt, by resisting or changing, so as to maintain an acceptable level of functioning.

Laws and Rules Governing Disaster Management

1. Disaster Management Act, 2005: It establishes structures and processes for disaster management at national, State, district and local levels, and mandates the creation of the National, State and District Disaster Management Authorities.
2. Disaster Management (Amendment) Act, 2025: It modernises the 2005 framework for urban risk, climate extremes and data-driven response.
3. It allows States to set up Urban Disaster Management Authorities in State capitals and Municipal Corporation cities. Eg. Karnataka’s authority for the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike.
4. It mandates national and State disaster databases covering risk assessments and real-time disaster data.
5. It gives statutory status to the National Crisis Management Committee and the High-Level Committee.
6. Constitution (Seventy-third Amendment) Act, 1992: Article 243G empowers Panchayati Raj Institutions to prepare plans and implement schemes, and the Eleventh Schedule places relief work and maintenance of community assets among their functions.

Government Initiatives for Disaster Preparedness

1. National Disaster Management Plan: Issued in 2016 and revised in 2019, it is India’s first all-hazard plan aligned to the Sendai Framework.
2. Disaster Management Plan of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj: Framed under Section 37 of the Disaster Management Act, 2005, it builds community-based planning from the village to the district panchayat.
3. Aapda Mitra: It trains community volunteers in first response, search and rescue in disaster-prone districts.
4. SACHET and the Common Alerting Protocol: They push multi-hazard alerts to every phone in an affected geography from one standardised feed.
5. Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure: Launched by India in 2019, it is an international organisation of over 50 countries working on disaster-proofing critical infrastructure.

Key Facts about Disaster Risk Reduction

1. Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, 2015-2030: Adopted at Sendai in Japan, it carries four priorities for action and seven global targets.
2. The United Nations custodian: The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction anchors global disaster risk reduction and runs the Sendai Framework Monitor for reporting against the seven targets.
3. India’s stated vision: The Prime Minister’s Ten-Point Agenda on Disaster Risk Reduction was announced in 2016 at the Asian Ministerial Conference.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2024, GS3, 15.0 marks] What is disaster resilience? How is it determined? Describe various elements of a resilience framework. Also mention the global targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030).”