Did you know that, in just the decade of the '90s, natural disasters affected 2.1 billion people and caused a damage of $687 billion?
While that figure is itself alarming, the picture gets a lot more frightening when disaggregated by region, by country. Between 1975 and 2000, low-income countries lost 11 per cent of their GDP due to natural disasters, and even high-income countries lost 2 per cent of GDP.
In terms of countries, Mongolia lost 1.5 times its GDP in the forest fire of 1996, Armenia lost 1.2 times its GDP in the 1988 earthquake, Tajikistan lost a full year's GDP in the 1992 flood.
China lost between 3-6 per cent of each year's GDP in annual floods between 1989 and 1996.
Rich countries like Japan lost $120 billion in the Kobe earthquake of 1995, and natural hazards from 1995 to 1997 cost the US about a billion dollars a week.
A host of such figures flitted across the screen, putting a horrible perspective to the terrifying pictures of disaster zones, at a seminar on disaster management in Kobe last week, bringing to life a subject few professional economists pay attention to, despite its obvious importance.
Because, as preparing for the Asian Disaster Reduction Centre seminar, and then attending it showed, most of these disasters were either avoidable or, most certainly, the damage could have been sharply reduced.
In the case of China, for instance, as Wan Hongtao of the China Institute of Water Resources said, the country's floods reduced after 1998 when land previously reclaimed for agriculture, was returned to the lake by demolishing the 'polders' used to block the water.
And, in the case of Gujarat, where around 15,000 people died in the 2001 earthquake, as Anil Sinha who used to be the executive director of the National Centre for Disaster Management in the Ministry of Home Affairs pointed out, the country's hazard map shows Gujarat is in the highest seismic zone, yet the state was completely unprepared for it.
(With 10 lakh houses restored, 1.2 lakh new ones built, 42,000 school classrooms repaired and 6,000 new ones built, the state has clearly done a magnificent job of reconstruction, but we're talking of mitigation here.)
But how do you avoid a flood, or an earthquake, given that solutions like reforestation and other ecological corrections take decades at the least?
Well, did you know that when the initial reports suggested the 'Orissa cyclone' was going to hit West Bengal, the Prime Minister himself had to call the chief minister to get the state government to evacuate possible victims!
And when the cyclone shifted direction, towards Orissa, it was found the state hardly had any cyclone shelters, despite being a cyclone-prone area.
And, as Amod Mani Dixit who is the executive director of the National Society for Earthquake Technology in Nepal showed during his presentation, an earthquake solution lay very much in India.
Professor Arya of the Roorkee University's designs to retrofit buildings by either strengthening the side columns or by inserting L-shaped 'stitches' in the wall-corners, are being used extensively to earthquake-proof buildings in the Himalayan kingdom.
And yet, while the ADRC conference was full of references to Arya's work, it was only after the Bhuj earthquake that one began hearing of Arya's low-cost designs in his home country.
Imagine the irony, the government spent over Rs 10,000 crore (Rs 100 billion) to repair the Gujarat damage, while just a fraction of this (Arya's design costs between 4-8 per cent of the original cost of building), if used in earthquake-proofing, could have reduced both the disaster and the damage.
It is, of course, a different matter that, forget earthquake-proofing, as various reports in The Indian Express showed, builders in the state flouted even basic design specifications, with (bribed?) local authorities turning a blind eye to it.
After floods ravaged Bangladesh in the 1990s (one of which cost the country a fourth of its GDP in that year), according to Akhtar Hossain who is the managing director of the Dhaka Water Supply & Sewerage Authority, the country developed a climate forecasting model in 2002, which could give even a 5-10 day advance warning of a flood, and more accurate long-term forecasts.
While Hossain claims the model is working well, he says a serious problem is that India does not give Bangladesh data on the flow in various river basins (it provides data sporadically, usually only when the rivers are overflowing in India) throughout the year.
The reason for this is simple: India does not want Bangladesh to have all data on water flows as this could cause a problem on the issue of sharing waters.
In fact, it is not just India which doesn't give flow data to Bangladesh, China doesn't provide this to India either, and similar issues apply to most major river basins across the world.
Yet, the fact remains, that sharing data and harnessing a river's potential together (as in the case of the Mekong River Commission between Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam) is the only way to prevent/mitigate disasters like floods and, for whatever reason, this is not happening in India.
Our neighbours, like Bangladesh and Nepal, blame India's attitude, but since I am no expert, I don't wish to comment except to say this is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.
So how do you get governments and the citizenry to shed their lethargy, and actively ready themselves to tackle such disasters?
Countries like Nepal have annual disaster day march pasts and drills, while in the Philippines, the authorities simulated disaster drills in some towns, and even had radio broadcasts telling citizens what to do -- they were then flooded with calls from neighbouring towns, to figure out just what was happening!
A more practical way, perhaps, would be to involve insurance companies in the exercise, and since towns/areas with disaster reduction strategies would have to pay lower premia, an external stakeholder gets created.
Turkey, and this is an interesting lesson in external stakeholders, has got private firms to approve and inspect building code and construction practices, to avoid the Gujarat type of occurrence one presumes -- these firms are then insured, and are financially responsible for the collapse of any structure within twenty years of the construction.
Postscript: The lethargy, by the way, doesn't apply only to natural disasters. In the early 1990s, the law was changed to make the use of speed governors mandatory in commercial vehicles, but it was only after the terrible tragedy in which a speeding bus crashed through a bridge killing scores of children three years ago, that the government in Delhi began taking action.
Naturally, there was litigation on the matter, and it is just about emerging from the country's courts!
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