India: State failed in disaster management: Amita Singh

By Sudha Nambudiri

The recent floods in Kerala have exposed the failure of the state government in alerting local bodies about the impending disaster, said Amita Singh, professor and chairperson of Special Centre for Disaster Research, JNU in Delhi.

Singh was in Kochi recently to release the ‘Report of Kerala Floods-2018’. The report, which was earlier released in Delhi, accused the state government of its gross dereliction of duty and handling of the entire flood situation.

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“It is a failure of Kerala state disaster management authority (KSDMA), headed by chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan and power minister M M Mani. They never took local bodies into confidence. The disaster was on the horizon for long. Kerala is the first state in the country to form the KSDMA after the Central Disaster Management Act came into existence in 2005. But they didn’t have an updated hazard vulnerability map, which should have been readied at the district level,” said Singh.

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“The most common excuse to the August deluge was that it was unprecedented. Our team, which has been looking into the state of environment and ecology in Kerala since September 2015 to the post-flood scenario, had said that intense rainfall-related disasters were not uncommon in Kerala. So, the argument that the deluge was unprecedented and hence, the lack of preparedness, falls flat,” she said.

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