Chennai floods: local businesses uniquely equipped to help during disaster

By Anu Jogesh

Exactly a year ago on Tuesday, heavy rains off the southeast coast of India set off a chain of events that resulted in one of the costliest disasters of 2015. Floods ravaged parts of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry between November and December last year. The city of Chennai was the hardest hit.

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Early this year, two urban development specialists, who work in Delhi but were born and brought up in Chennai, decided to gather lessons from the Chennai floods. The organisation they lead, TARU Leading Edge, has worked extensively on cities and disaster resilience and is currently gathering evidence on resilience interventions in India and South East Asia as part of the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network. 

"Building resilience requires learning from both experience and science for addressing new and emerging urban challenges,"said Umamaheshwaran Rajasekar, the TARU director. "My colleagues and I wanted to capture some of the initiatives undertaken by various groups to manage the disaster to help others learn and incorporate such practices within their preparedness, prevention and response plans.” 

The stories they collected, along with the attendant lessons, capture how a number of organisations were able to play to their strengths, and also employ innovative means to help the city in myriad ways during the disaster.