Editorial
Disaster unpreparedness
Monsoon is finally here. The period between June and early September, roughly lasting a hundred days, gets the most rainfall. It has defined the lives across Nepal and large parts of South Asia since time immemorial.Monsoon is finally here. The period between June and early September, roughly lasting a hundred days, gets the most rainfall. It has defined the lives across Nepal and large parts of South Asia since time immemorial. If Nepal’s economy grew at an extremely healthy clip the last fiscal year, the credit goes to outstanding paddy production, which in turn relies heavily on stable rainfall.
But rain also leaves behind a trail of destruction: floods, landslides, epidemics, displacement are most common during the rainy season. Nepal Disaster Report 2015, a biennial government publication, notes that Nepal is one of the most disaster prone countries. The rains kill hundreds of people each year and wreak havoc to our already-thin infrastructure of roads, bridges, irrigation canals. Restoring them often takes as long as, or even longer than, building them.
Disasters hit livelihoods and are a huge setback to the national economy too.
Three factors have contributed to our poor disaster preparedness: the frequency and scale of the disasters, fatalism, and inadequate preparedness mainly on the part of the government and other stakeholders. The biggest natural disaster in living memory, the Gorkha Earthquake, left around 9,000 dead and rendered close to more than 600,000 houses completely and close to 300,000 houses partially destroyed.
Granted, we don’t have adequate resources to either retrofit old buildings or build new ones to make them withstand big quakes. But adequate preparedness would have helped mitigate the damages. Lax enforcement or absence of safe building legislations has led to unauthorised construction, including of public buildings, schools and colleges, both government and private, and other facilities which house a large number of people. Absence of proactive legislations and reactive approaches are contributing factors to Nepal’s vulnerability, according to the Disaster Report.
It should be noted that Nepal is the fourth most climate vulnerable country in the world.
To offer a broader perspective, Nepal saw an overall increase of disasters in 2013-014—with floods and landslides causing a high number of deaths and loss of property. Though government officials and reports claim that the scale and frequency of disasters have brought about “a shift of attitude on the part of the planners, government officials, donor agencies, NGOs and INGOs towards the need for a coordinated disaster preparedness and response mechanism,” the results on the ground are still pretty dismal. One only has to look around at the recent private constructions in the Kathmandu Valley to conclude that both government officials and private builders seem to have forgotten that a 7.8M earthquake hit central Nepal only two years ago.