India not ready to handle natural disasters

The country has too few support systems and too few medical experts

Iftikhar Gilani
New Delhi

The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) has said India is not prepared to face natural disasters.

The NDMA arrived at this conclusion after taking stock of psycho-social support and mental health services in the country.

The stock-taking found the Japan earthquake and tsunami a wakeup call for India, because the Himalayan belt was sitting on a major seismic zone. It was found that around 229 districts, more than a third of the country, falls under seismic zones IV and V, and was just waiting for a quake in the not too distant future.

Even major cities like Guwahati, Srinagar, New Delhi, Chandigarh, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai fall under high seismic zones.

Sharing the concern, NDMA Vice-chairman M Shashidhar Reddy said India has only 0.2 psychiatrists per one lakh population, whereas the world average is 1.2. “Similarly, the world average for psychologists and psychiatric nurses is 0.6 and 0.4 respectively, whereas India has only 0.03 for both,” he said.

the NDMA has so far released 27 guidelines on the management of natural and man-made disasters and also issues like medical preparedness and mass casualty management.

Reddy, however, said implementation of the guidelines is a difficult task and we must have a plan for this.

In the meantime, the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests has begun to move forward on mapping India’s costal hazard line. A ministry release said Stereo Digital Aerial Photography (SDAP) would soon come into action to map India’s coastline.

At a cost of Rs 27 crore, the SDAP would cover the 11,000 km arc coastline from Gujarat to West Bengal, with an area of 60,000 sq km.

This is a critical part of the planned management of the country’s coastal zone. The World Bank has assisted the project, which would map the hazard line for the mainland coast for five years.

This would include collection and presentation of data, identifying of flood lines over 40 years, including the impact of rising sea levels, and a prediction of erosions over the next 100 years.

For this purpose, the Indian coastline has been divided into eight blocks: (1) from the Indo-Pak border to Somnath in Gujarat; (2) Somnath to Ulhas River in Maharashtra; (3) Ulhas River to Sharavathi River in Karnataka; (4) Sharavathi River to Cape Comorin in Tamil Nadu; (5) Cape Comorin to Ponniyur River in Tamil Nadu; (6) Ponniyur River to Krishna River in Andhra Pradesh; (7) Krishna River to Chhatrapur in Orissa; and (8) Chhatrapur to India-Bangladesh Border in West Bengal.

Iftikhar Gilani is a Special Correspondent with Tehelka.com
iftikhar@tehelka.com