A district-level workshop on issues and challenges in climate change adaption and disaster relief and rehabilitation (DRR) and ensuring accountability in DRR was organised jointly by the Ganjam Disaster Response Forum, Coast Council and Youth for Social Development (YSD) here on Wednesday.
A recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that increasing temperature, water scarcity, impact on food production and security, rapid urbanisation and industrialisation, increasing impact on human health, security, livelihoods, and poverty as whole create new poverty trap and slow down economic growth (GDP). Therefore proper strategy to meet climate change effects and manage the post-disaster situations was a need of the hour, the speakers participating said.
A survey carried out by an YSD team and cited in the workshop says that issue of accountability appears to be a distant dream during times of a disaster. It has also revealed many issues of corruption. It disclosed that people affected due to Phailin were not aware of their entitlements at the time of disaster rescue and also during post-disaster relief operations initiated by the Government.
It appears that estimation of loss/damage of property was done arbitrarily with local bigwigs dominating the process more often than not. As a result many victims of Phailin did not receive their due from the Government as a part of the relief activities, the report said. Most of the speakers argued that there needs to be change right from nomenclature to accountability practices during a disaster. To start with it is important to change disaster management in to ‘disaster governance’ as the term management excludes people and does not include entitlements.
Disaster governance, on the other hand, implies participation of people and is oriented towards entitlements. Management always has top-down approach where as governance has a bottom up approach, they pointed out. A total of 1,512 households were surveyed in two blocks such as Ganjam and Ranegeilunda in Ganjam district by the YSD team. Among the households surveyed, around 76 per cent of them belonged to the BPl category. An overwhelming majority (nearly 99 per cent) of the people surveyed stated that early warning system worked well. Only 70 per cent of the people reported evacuation before the disaster, while only 60 per cent of them said that they were evacuated by the Government agencies. Timely receipt of compensation as per damage assessment appears to be a serious issue with nearly 79 per cent of them reporting of receiving compensation after more than 30 days, the survey report said.
Satellite television seems to have made proper inroads with many of them (around 47 per cent) stating that they learnt about the Phailin cyclone through television. Around 28 per cent learnt about the disaster and were vacated through loud speakers.
loss of livelihood appears to be a major factor bothering the Phailin affected victims. Nearly 62 per cent of the victims were dependent on daily labour. Some of the major concerns in the relief operations after Phailin were livelihood and relief for loss /damage of property. Corrupt practices range from taking bribe for photographs, demanding money for distributing relief material, distributing relief material to one’s own and not giving relief to households with real loss / damage of property. From the community participation point of view major issues appear to be non-participation of community during various processes like evacuation, damage assessment, relief distribution and long term reconstruction. As a result accountability seems to be at stake. The report highlights some of these issues and attempts to suggest an alternative in terms of citizen/civic engagement in ‘disaster governance’, the study revealed.
The workshop was attended by more than 25 local NGOs, 25 coastal and slum communities in Ganjam and activists and academics. ADM Sitansu Kumar Rout participated as the disaster mitigation chief of Ganjam district, while Prof Govind Panda, academician and founder UAA, joined as the key note speaker. Convenor of Coast Council Sudarshan Chhotaray participated as an expert in climate change and disaster risk reduction. Mangaraj Panda and loknath Misra of Ganjam Disaster Response Forum managed the workshop and Bibhu Prasad Sahu of YSD presented the relief accountability report and offered vote of thanks.