India: Kerala floods: How to hit self goals on disaster preparedness

By Himanshu Upadhyaya

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Auditors found out that the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) had constituted an expert committee for the identification of flood-affected districts in India in January 2009. This expert committee was tasked with establishing the parameters for proper categorisation of flood-prone districts and preparing an updated list of flood-affected districts. [By] July 2012, the flood hazard map of only one state (Assam) was completed, while for Bihar, auditors were told that work was nearing completion. Audit scrutiny revealed that for the states of Odisha and West Bengal, work had not been taken up yet, as [of] July 2012.

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In the year 2017, another performance audit—Performance Audit of Schemes for Flood Control and Flood Forecasting—entered the public domain. Chapter 4 of this audit report was devoted to checking progress on flood forecasting. We are told that:

“[Between] 2006 and 2007, the CWC [Central Water Commission] had established 175 flood forecasting stations, comprising of 147 level flood forecasting stations, and the number remained stagnant till 2014-15. Presently (i.e. 2016-17), CWC’s flood forecasting network covers 184 flood forecasting stations in 19 states, the Union Territory (UT) of Dadra and Nagar Haveli and the National Capital Territory of Delhi.”

CAG auditors also made a shocking revelation that:

“CWC has not established any flood forecasting station in 15 States/UTs i.e. Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Daman and Diu, Goa, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Lakshadweep, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan and Sikkim”.

Shockingly, during the course of this performance audit, CWC officers stated that 56 telemetry stations had been installed until July 2016 as per Twelfth Plan proposals, but the basin wise details of those telemetry stations were not available! How does an auditor plan a joint site visit if the location and basin details are not known for these telemetry stations?

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