2013 Floods, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, North India

In 1976, the Government of India set up the National Flood Commission (Rashtriya Barh Ayog) “to evolve a coordinated, integrated and scientific approach to the flood control problems in the country and to draw out a national plan fixing priorities for implementation in the future.” Though the RBA report was submitted in 1980 and accepted by Government, not much progress seems to have been made in the implementation of its recommendations.
In 1997, the Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council created a ‘Vulnerability Atlas’ that mapped the extents of the disaster prone areas of the country. In light of fresh census data after 2001, it called for greater public awareness and the need for legislation that affected town planning, ‘techno-legal regimes’ for land use zoning in vulnerable areas, protection of critical buildings used by the public and, most significantly, the empowerment of local bodies to exercise control.
The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), the supreme disaster management agency in the country set up through the Disaster Management Act of 2005, published guidelines for Management of Floods in 2008. In its thorough assessment of measures required in the short and long term, it highlighted the ‘Immediate’ requirement for (i) identification of flood prone villages, blocks, tehsils and districts on national, state and district level maps, (ii) amendment of building bylaws to make future buildings in flood prone areas flood-safe, and (iii) “notification of regulation for prohibiting reclamation of wetlands and natural depressions”. The immediacy of its recommendations has been consigned to the scrapheap, although they form the bedrock of most recommendations about disaster mitigation.
The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), in its report on ‘Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation’ reminds us that from 1970 to 2008, over 95 percent of the deaths due to natural disasters occurred in developing countries which clearly signifies that such disasters are not related to geographic location but the environment preservation.