The Uttarakhand catastrophe has made the obvious more clear – India as a nation and Indians as a population have scant respect for their environment. Almost all major cities are ticking time-bombs, what with an overkill of unsafe constructions and relentless degradation without any care for a region’s vulnerability. Experts say, India is one of the most vulnerable countries on the atlas with 22 States and four Union Territories perilously open to disaster. DEEBASHREE MOHANTY brings you the alarming picture

Shimla: The most disaster prone city in India. landslides, earthquake and cloud bursts are high danger elements.

Estimated loss of property in case of a natural or manmade disaster: Over Rs3,00,000 crore

Most vulnerable parts: The entire low lying Shimla waiting to get wiped off

Estimated loss of life: Over 1 crore inhabitants and tourists could die or suffer irreparable damage.

Damage control measures: Nil.

Delhi:Is also sitting on disaster although damage control seems to be better off than most places. Fear from earthquakes, floods and fire mostly. Delhi lies in the seismic IV zone and is surrounded by two main flowing rivers which lurk at the 204.63 metres mark.

loss of property and life in a tragedy: The number will be unbelievably huge with most parts of Central and North Delhi being exposed to earthquake prone problems. While East Delhi has problems of being submerged due to massive floods, parts of West Delhi are highly susceptible to major fires.

Most vulnerable places: At present there are 1400 urban villages like Munirka, Ber Sarai etc which are overcrowded and risky.

Disaster management: None of the buildings (including Rashtrapti Bhavan and other Government buildings) have followed the earthquake resistance security norms.

Mumbai:Fear from floods, earthquake and fire. Is universally known as the world’s worst planned cities vis a vis disaster management.

Estimated loss: Massive. In the last decade alone, 30 million people have suffered due to natural disasters. The numbers will only double in this decade owing to the city’s population density, according to the Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council of India. Experts believe that the entire city can be washed off in a matter of days.

Most Vulnerable Spots: Irla in Juhu and Haji Ali in South Mumbai are places to be worst hit in case of a flood.

Gangtok:In the middle of extreme seismic activity. The hills are young. Add to this, faulty roads and flouting construction guideline and you have the worst possible disaster zone.

Most Vulnerable Spots: lumsey, Nandok, Rumtek and Rawtey in the East district, in the West district, Geyzing and Rinchenpong.

Kolkata:Fear from fire floods and super storms. A global screening study makes an estimate of the exposure of the world's large port cities to coastal flooding because of storm surge and damage due to high winds. It also investigates how climate change is likely to impact Kolkata to coastal flooding by 2070.

Estimated loss: The study forecast over 30 million people being impacted due to this massive flood

Abhijeet Ghosh and Sujit Chatterjee, retired senior members of Disaster Management Board of India have discussed India’s fragile States at length in their paper titled India Possible Disaster.

“The Uttarakhand catastrophe is just the tip of the iceberg. There are cities in India where tragedy looms large,” Chatterjee, a fellow from the Institute of California Disaster Management, says. He has studied the country’s geographical and latitudinal data to the come out with startling facts.

He says that hill stations will bear the brunt of Mother Nature in the coming decades. “In one way, it’s karma. People have through the ages and because of their greed, molested Mother Earth. Now is the payback time,” Chatterjee tells you, apparently annoyed with manmade disasters that India has witnessed in the past century.

His point is that tsunamis and earthquakes cannot be prevented but loss of lives and property minimised by careful planning. Chatterjee also tells you that the number of natural disasters has increased four-fold due to manmade problems. In his this paper, Chatterjee discusses how populations and urbanisation will result in doomsday for India before the entire world faces it.

“Earlier earthquakes and tsunamis were very faintly felt. In parts of India, like Angul in Odisha, there was never a tremor felt till 1997. At that time, the population of this sleepy town was 90,389 people, three times than in the 1980s. Today, tremors here have become more intense, much more regular and loss of property has been reported more often than not. This is a very small dot on the map of India. But there are some 1,00,000 such small dots all over our map. That is a danger signal. It says we must stop,” Chatterjee tells you.

According to a recent geological estimate, there is an earthquake of a magnitude over 8 on the Richter scale that could strike the hills and when that happens, our popular hill havens will turn into concrete rubbles.

“I have said earlier that disaster is looming large over us and we have to act quickly. Guwahati and Srinagar which are at seisimic zone V could be devasted if an earthquake strikes. There is an interesting study done by the Mumbai and Madras IITs on the analogy of the great earthquake of 1905 in Kangra valley. The findings revealed that if ever an earthquake occurs in the State again, its epicentre would fall between Sundernagar and Mandi. With a depth of 15 km, the rupture would go up to 200 km and its intensity would be 8 to 10 on the Richter scale. The effect of this earthquake would be felt in Delhi and all townships in the hill State would be the severely affected,” Brig (retd) Dr BK Khanna, senior consultant with NDMA, says.

He adds that the magnitude of destruction, could be at least 3.4 per cent deaths and 17 per cent injuries in a population of 8.14 lakh of Shimla district alone if tremors of maximum intensity happen during the night. At the State level, given a population of 68.6 lakh, the loss can go up to 2.3 per cent deaths and 16 per cent injuries.

“Just a minor movement below the earth is enough to start a concrete avalanche in Shimla and the loss of lives can be alarming. We saw in the Bhuj earthquake how resistant buildings collapsed because of the magnitude of the quake. In Shimla, there is an abject lack of concern for quake-resistant features. The buildings and high rises in the city, including the ones on the slopes and those on the slopes, are far from safe,” Prof Rakesh Bohra from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, recently said in his thesis on how vulnerable hill stations are to natural calamities.

Harish Chandra from National Disaster Management in India, a Government body agrees with professor Bohra. “A disaster in the hills will spell doom for a lot of people. When one building collapses uphill, it will create a cascading effect and bring down all the other buildings in the foothills. The rolling debris will wipe out everything on its way. The catastrophe will be unimaginable. In Himachal Pradesh, which falls under seismic Zones 4 and 5 (earthquakes in the magnitude of 8 or more on the Richter scale) highrise buildings should be least desirable but in places like Shimla, Barog, Manali, Kasauli and Solan, numerous six storey buildings have come up. All these areas have high risk of disaster and the control mechanism is not in place,” Chandra says, adding that after the Uttarakhand catastrophe, he shudders to think what will happen in Himachal Pradesh.

For the Government of HP, however, things are under control. Of course, illegal constructions are a part and parcel of urbanisation and a necessary evil but governing bodies say they have set themselves a strict target to step up disaster management in the State.

“All hill stations are vulnerable to accidents, especially landslides. But now we are more aware of the magnitude of disaster after the Uttarakhand event. latest earthquake resistant materials are being used for the construction of new buildings. The procedure to procure land in the hill station is much more stringent now.

And we have made sure that builders abide by safety guidelines. As for disaster management, we have started our exercise with building awareness. People should know what to do in the face of tragedy. That solves a part of the problem. At the Government level, we are planning to introduce more policies to ensure that we are prepared when the need arises,” Meera Mohanty, director, Urban Development, Shimla, tells you.

Mohanty refuses to comment on the nature of these policies but she believes that with the introduction of these strict features, Shimla could be a safer haven.

But today, the capital city and its peripheries, particularly the cemetery and Kachighat areas are the most vulnerable. Here, buildings of all shapes and sizes have mushroomed, covering every inch of the steep slopes. Most of these buildings do not even have proper approaches and drainage systems.

According to the latest municipality reports, there are more than 11,500 structures in the old Shimla municipal corporation territory and another 32,000 in the newly merged areas. Out of these, more than 10,000 structures are unauthorised, while the total number of such buildings in the State is close to 41,000.

“The seismic code for designing buildings comes into play in case of high-rise structures which have more than three storeys,” Atul Mahajan, chief engineer, public works department, explains. He adds that quake-resistant buildings need more steel reinforcements and bigger columns and beams. Mahajan maintains that all buildings and bridges in Shimla were designed after taking the seismic factor into account.

However, the department has been not only constructing high-rise structures like the 10-storeyed High Court building, but also using cantilevers in designs, which should be avoided at all costs in quake-prone areas.

Another point being that the seismic code stresses on keeping the structures as light as possible but the municipal department has been overloading the buildings by paving floors, and even the outer walls, with marble, Kota stone and red sandstone.

Mahajan explains that not everything can be blamed on the Government because it is the people who make a choice of not adhering to the norms. “A quake-resistant structure requires about 30 per cent more steel and cement, which adds to the cost. No one wants to invest that kind of money and it is the people who want to compromise on safety,” Mahajan says, pointing out that it is not just HP that is inviting disasters. Even the north east is extremely vulnerable to a collapse during a natural calamity.

The Institute of National Disaster Management in New Delhi released a report which shows how most of our cities are ill equipped to handle disaster situations. “We are making strides to better the disaster management situation in India but we still have a long way to go. Improving building bylaws is not going to help matters in any way. The need of the hour is proper training and awareness,” Aditya Srivasta from the NDMI states.

Back to the plains, the National Capital Region is worse off in case of a tragedy. The entire region falls in seismic zone-IV, which indicates high risk to earthquakes. Its densely populated areas with large amounts of unsafe building stock, non-engineered structures, the huge number of unauthorised colonies and urban slums only adds to its vulnerability.

Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s office told Foray that “an earthquake can cause unprecedented damage to Delhi. Disasters can happen at any time and anywhere. It is essential to concentrate on preparedness and training.”

The Government body, the Delhi Disaster Management Authority, has been toying with ideas to plan a better and safer Delhi. Nine emergency operation centres have been set up under it at the district levels and a 24-hour helpline No. 1077 has been made functional.

But is this enough to avoid a catastropheIJ “The building bylaws have been in place for a long time now but it is being openly flouted by the aam aadmi and influential people alike. The agencies responsible for checking that the norms are being adhered to are not proactive. The Government doesn’t even have proper tools to determine illegal constructions. They are in no position to give you an exact position of where we stand vis a vis disaster management,” Prof Chandan Ghosh of the National Institute of Disaster Management, says.

Engineers are of the opinion that it will not be easy for the Government to ensure construction of quake-resistant structures by just amending building bylaws. The answer, they say lies in creating awareness among people and evolving a number of standard structural designs. “Training has to be imparted to contractors, masons and other workmen connected with construction activity to ensure that safety measures like provision of seismic bands and proper detailing of joints to make the building quake-resistant. There is no extension agency in the State for dissemination of training to the workmen. Therefore no systematic effort has been made to introduce new materials to make the constructions safer,” Ghosh tells you.

The National Disaster Management Authority is doing all it can to be prepared in the face of a disaster.

“For buildings already constructed, we are advising a Rapid Video Study wherein we can look at the way the building has been constructed and then suggest how it can be modified to take in shock possible in case an earthquake strikes,” Dr Khanna concludes.