Professionals replace political appointees
The Narendra Modi Government's makeover of the National Disaster Management Authority comes not a day too soon. The agency has been stripped of much of its flab and given a lean and hopefully more efficient look. Its nine-member board, that included a deputy Chairperson, has been replaced by a four-member team, with the Prime Minister retaining his position as the Chairperson.
More importantly, all the new members are professionals from the field of disaster management — not out-of-work politicians, retired bureaucrats and party loyalists of the sort that have traditionally manned the organisation. In fact, each new appointee has an expertise in a different area, thereby making the team a comprehensive one.
For example, Mr Kamal Kishore has been an advisor to the Disaster Reduction and Recovery Team of the United Nations Development Programme, while Mr DN Sharma is Director of the Health Safety and Environment Group at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, where he has been overseeing the radiological physics and advisory division, the industrial hygiene and safety section, and the environmental monitoring and assessment section.
He also has experience working with the NDMA for several years. The third member of the team is lieutenant General NC Marwah, who was Chief of the Integrated Defence Staff to the Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee. His military experience will be particularly helpful in coordinating with the Armed Forces that play an important role in organising relief and rescue missions on the ground.
In fact, one of the most glaring examples of the NDMA's many institutional failures has been that, in times of crises, it is the Armed Forces that do all the heavy lifting while the disaster management agency is often missing in action. This was especially the case during the recent floods in Jammu & Kashmir as also in the aftermath of the floods and landslides Uttarakhand faced in 2013.
In both instances, the NDMA was found to ill-prepared and utterly rudderless to deal with the challenges at hand. Despite having ample resources at its disposal, the agency failed to mobilise itself; it couldn't even coordinate effectively with the Ministry of Home Affairs, its nodal agency. That even civil society was able to stitch together a quicker and more coherent response to the crises, underlines the extent of the NDMA's managerial and administrative failures.
And that is not all. The authority performed poorly even outside of crisis situations. For instance, it was supposed to have drawn up a national disaster management and response plan, but even nine years after its establishment in 2005, it has precious little to show. No wonder then that the Comptroller and Auditor-General, in a recent report, described the NDMA as “ineffective in most of [its] core areas”, while a parliamentary Public Accounts Committee referred to it as a “mere spectator”.
A Government task force, constituted in 2013 to review the country's preparedness in the face of national disasters, criticised the NDMA for being “a think tank without any link to ground realities”. Hopefully, the situation will now take a turn for the better. To this end, Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself will have to play a more active role than his predecessor.