Not would many disagree that coping with life after each Kosi flood has become a routine affair for the people of north Bihar. Every year, arrival of the monsoon is both worshiped and cursed in this part of the country, largely dependant on agricultural output. Fear of rivers getting inundated during the rainy season and water splurging to habitats, destroying lacs of acres of crops apart from loss of other properties, looms large in the minds of the people in the area.
In the past, floods generally did not last more than one month and people were back to their home and work, braving the odds and perhaps challenging the very nature of such frequent floods. But this year it was different. The worst-ever flood in north Bihar, after a breakage on the east embankment of the river Kosi near Kusaha in Nepal on August 18, was in no mood this time to give people in its vicinity any reason to relax. The widespread devastation by this year’s Kosi flood and the struggle to deal with the life-after by the affected people, for which only developmental negligence by successive Governments both at the Centre and the State are to blame, have also brought to the fore man’s long-cherished desire to tame rivers and failing at it time after time.
Having suffered floods, earthquakes, cyclones and tsunamis, by now it’s well-accepted and widely understood by strategists and intellectuals that in case of a widespread catastrophe, whether natural or man-made, no disaster management body or Government in any country is capable enough to completely avoid the risks and losses involved with such disasters. Then, isn’t it wiser to look for options that can mitigate the risks and lessen the damage to the lives thereafter?
Even today, after 60 years of braving such disasters in one form or the other in free India, our leaders and Governments are blindly following structural measures like construction of dams and embankments as the only available option, as was envisioned by our political forefathers. They have failed to visualise, however, that it is non-structural measures like flood forecasting, warning system and flood insurance that can mitigate the risk more efficiently. These could help bring about efficiencies in all the aspects of disaster management – relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction.
Sadly, even after so much hue and cry about disaster management bodies being created in recent years, these ex-ante mechanisms to manage disasters are almost absent in the country. An exception in this regard has been the Centre’s attempt to design a flood insurance product in the Madhubani district of Bihar by assessing risk involved, vulnerability and insurable conditions.
It does not take much to realise that since there is a risk-factor involved with one’s life or health, as a counter-measure one gets life or health insurance. The same logic can be applied to houses or property in flood or earthquake-prone areas.
As of now, the household insurance policy basically covers fire, but also includes a flood insurance cover. However, after the deluge in Mumbai in 2005, with almost 10,000 policy-holders filing claims totalling Rs 1,500 crore, public sector insurance firms were mulling to drop the word ‘flood’ from household insurance policies. Now, here is the catch. Since in these cases the claim for cover is huge as against a claim by a life insurance policy-holder, insurance companies do not hesitate to think over any such decision.
And here is what we need to do. The Central Government must promote flood insurance in flood-prone areas with a well-planned premium sharing between the Centre, the State Government and the insurance holder. It should be made mandatory for private insurance companies, by allowing them to cover household insurance, to work in rural areas and direct all public sector players in the field to encourage instead of dropping one cover or the other according to their profit needs.
Making it broader in nature and application, the Government also should not waver to try area-specific insurance policies. For example, compulsory earthquake insurance in Kutchh, Gujarat and in the high-intensity quake zones in the north India and cyclone insurance in the coastal areas of Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.
It is notable that lack of adequate funds hampers relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction activities when a disaster hits. Despite a large area in India being prone to either flood or earthquake, our Central and States Governments hesitate from adequate investment in mitigation efforts. Insufficient funds are set aside to pay for relief and reconstruction efforts. As a result, when a disaster occurs, the Government is often forced to use funds earmarked for other programmes, disrupting the operations of those programmes. This leads to a slowdown in the overall growth of the State.
These measures are not only more practical in nature and consume far less resources and time, this is also beneficial for the concerned State administration which gets berserk after each such catastrophe, leaving no time and fund for the development of the rest of the State.
