Essay on Relief and Rehabilitation During and After Disaster

Relief and rehabilitation come immediately after the disaster. The basic difference between them is that relief relates to the immediate days and weeks after the disaster when attempts are made to provide basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, medicine, etc. to the victims. Rehabilitation relates to the work undertaken in the following weeks and months, for the restoration of basic services to enable the population to return to normalcy.

The policy on disaster management, as at present in vogue, seeks to provide relief and arouse the energies of social groups, NGOs etc. in the total organized effort to ensure the least damage to the affected population due to the natural calamity. Lives must be saved and deterioration and destitution of people prevented. It also aims at community effort and shaping the infrastructure of society such that recurrence of scarcities and other calamities are minimized.

The approach of moving away from crisis management to risk management initiated -some two decades back arid thereafter to integrated disaster preparedness involving reliable early warnings, carefully planned emergency response and better community preparedness has also been found to be highly rewarding in as much as notable success was achieved in reaching timely relief in recent years.

A comparison of the major cyclones, which resulted in disasters in 1977 and again in 1990 in Andhra Pradesh, underlined the beneficial role of disaster preparedness strategy. While both had similar destructive potentials, the loss of lives was drastically reduced from 10,000 in 1977 to 910 in 1990. Similarly, the loss of cattle came down from 230,000 in 1977 to 27,000 in 1990.

Similarly, in the wake of unprecedented floods in August 1986 in the Godavari river in Andhra Pradesh (A.P.) based on Central Water Commission's timely and accurate flood forecasts and warnings, the A.P. Govt. was able to move over one million people who were living within 10 km of flood banks to places of safety.

There are many more instances to show the preparedness approach as superior in dealing with relief and rehabilitation. This also points to the importance of preparing a detailed, factual and documented account of every disaster and the manner in which relief and rehabilitation were handled and the results thereof in a comprehensive manner.

Each disaster situation must thereafter be reviewed to draw appropriate lessons for the future. Unfortunately, such detailed records are not available for most disasters of the past in the requisite details. Another matter of importance is the need to avoid exaggerated or inadequate documentation of the effects of a disaster.

Most often, in recent decades, there had been a tendency to exaggerate highly the adverse effects and damages allegedly suffered in order to arouse sympathies or to obtain greater relief grants. This tendency needs to be eschewed.

The National Flood Commission in its report (1980) had drawn pointed attention to this aspect as under:

"It may be stated at the outset that the available data, which we have used, suffer from many deficiencies. These generally stem from factors like inability of the primary reporting agencies to assess the magnitude of the flood damages objectively, human bias in reporting, arbitrary methods adopted in estimating yields and crop values, absence of a suitable mechanism for supervision, checking and lack of coordination at the lower levels between concerned departments of the Govt. Possibility of deliberate distortion of these statistics with a view to gaining some governmental assistance and concessions in some areas also cannot be ruled out....."

In-depth disaster case studies should be prepared as soon as possible after the event. Further, these should be archived and disseminated widely and may be put on INTERNET as well. These case studies need to be multi-disciplinary and multi-functional. There can be no rigid format for all places or all types of events. However, a certain basic format has evolved over the years and the past cases reported will serve as some guide.

As a result of National Workshops on 'Building up of National Capability to cope with Disasters' held only a few years back, another important dimension of the two distinct components of Disaster mitigation viz. preparedness and relief was pointedly focused upon.

Even though communities and their administration plan and execute policies and strategies appropriate to the requirements of both these domains, there is a subtle difference.

Disaster relief involves adequate infrastructural set up and quick response on the part of the entire system, primarily dealt with by governments and institutions.

On the other hand, disaster preparedness is a continuous process, which has to involve all sections of society. These points out the important role of local communities and local institutions, which need to create and sustain disaster preparedness.