Monsoon rains come every year, but the flooding caused by this year’s downpour has been some of the worst in decades for India, Bangladesh and Nepal.
19 million people have been displaced by the deluge. That’s roughly the entire population of New York State, the 3rd largest state in the union, or around the entire population of Sri Lanka.
Put another way, these monsoon floods have already produced nineteen times as many refugees as Katrina did. Katrina scattered up to one million Americans, and that was the largest American population displacement in 150 years.
The biggest danger from the rain isn’t drowning, it’s the disease that it brings once water supplies get contaminated:
“Entire villages are days away from a health crisis if people are not reached in the coming days,” … UNICEF’s health chief in India, said in a statement.
The threat of waterborne disease is high because wells have been contaminated by floodwaters … In Bangladesh, there were 1,400 reported cases of diarrhea in the past 24 hours… [Link]
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p designtimesp=”17525″>The danger is worse because floodwaters have closed the roads to many villages, so aid workers can’t easily distribute food and clean water. The Indian air force has air dropped food for 2 million people in Bihar. This is going to be a serious task, one that will require both government and civil society working together, something they are lousy at doing.
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A lack of coordination between relief organizations can have serious effects. During the 2005 Pakistan earthquake all the groups involved worked without even a map to determine who was most important to reach, who had been reached, and who still needed help. Not only were they uncoordinated, but they were hostile to the very idea of coordination:
no one was coordinating the hundreds of aid groups… Improving coordination would not be hard, the economists realized…. they designed a simple form and approached donors with a simple request: whenever you send out a consignment, please fill out one of these. There were paper copies available as well as a Web-based form and a call center.
The reaction, when it was not actually hostile, tended to be derisive: “Are you mad? You to want us to spend time filling out forms when people are dying? We need to go and go fast.” Go where? the economists wanted to ask. But nobody seemed to care… the most reputable Pakistani NGO … did not fill out a single form. The United Nations team filled out a few. [Link]
The same sort of thing happened after the Tsunami – plenty of groups stepped in, but their efforts were not coordinated at all, so areas near roads got too much (and often of the wrong stuff) while areas further out went without.
Why don’t they do better? Well, everybody is in such a hurry to do something that nobody wants to do the unglamorous work of coordination so that those most in need get helped. And of course it doesn’t hurt than neither voters nor donors penalize governments or NGOs a year later if it turns out that their efforts yielded nice PR photos but did little to help those most in need.
We need more than feel good efforts, we need either accountability or a whole bleepload of gopher wood.
If you want to donate, a great place to start is one of the International Red Cross groups.
Related posts: Here comes the rain again
And of course it doesn’t hurt than neither voters nor donors
right. human psychology is at work. ;-(
ennis wrote:
Reminds me of 1994 when Gujarat was hit with floods and the subsequent Plague scare.
The Bengal area (WB and Bangladesh) has a very high population density (951.3/km²), that’s just a little less than the density of New Orleans (973/km²)! No wonder the high figures.
It’s a shame that this happens almost every monsoon.
nobody wants to do the unglamorous work of coordination
Its pretty sad that after all these years of horrifying monsoon fiascoes, we still haven’t got it down to a science. I know that its a multifaceted issue but this is an annual occurrence in these areas and we still have no disaster plan that works efficiently.
just a quick question for those of you who know more than me about this: when we go to the donation website….why isn’t ‘floods in India’ an option? Bangladesh and Pakistan are there. is the gov refusing aid yet again?
Yes, from the article No aid was being distributed in India because no requests for help had been received, he said.
The Indian air force, however, stepped up relief efforts, dropping supplies for 2 million people cut off by some of the worst flooding in eastern Bihar state in 30 years.
Sorry, it was in one of the stories I linked to, but I didn’t bring that quote out.
Ugh, I read about this in last week’s Economist and was so disappointed.
Except the floods are much worse this year. You would think, given that this is relatively inevitable (and only going to get worse with climate change) that states and the central government would coordinate disaster relief plans for “reasonable” or “forseeable” disasters (e.g. flooding, earthquakes).
Camille – I figured the quote from the Banerjee article would catch your eyes, JPAL and all …
I think that’s part of the reason why there is no political backlash when they get bad like this year. If the floods had been in urban area, the government would pay. But in rural areas, given that it’s an annual event, people can shrug it off. What made Katrina seismic was the fact that it was so unusual, and even then, it’s political impact has been limited.
Thanks, Ennis! I actually did read it, but thought that since I hype JPAL so much, already, it would be best to tone it down a notch 😉
TRUE. Presuming those urban areas vote for the current party or pony up cash. I think this was one of the major differences with Katrina (although Katrina is full of its own history/complexities, and I don’t want to detract from the floods).
Perhaps this is basic, or maybe it has already been discussed, but does anyone know why the Indian government refuses to take aid from the UN or similar organizations? I just can’t understand why the Indian government wouldn’t do everything in it’s power to help these people from dieing. I realize India has limited resources, but why not take as much help as is available? It’s disgusting that they would let this happen even once, let alone ‘every year.’ There’s a lot more to say, but I’ll leave it there for right now. Any enlightenment on this issue is welcome 🙂
During the tsunami, the central government also refused to ship or transport aid that was offered from northern states to the tsunami-affected southeastern ones. Whack.
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I think the major thing is that India, as an entire country, doesn’t need aid. In fact, and I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe that the Indian government even offered aid for Katrina and refused it for the tsunami when that happened. It’s not that India has limited resources, it’s that planning for the monsoon and coordinating relief afterwards is the issue.
Secondly, as much as people are going to hate me for saying this, and believe me I feel as bad for the victims as everyone else does, but honestly, it’s freaking HARD to plan monsoon relief. It’s easy to bitch about how the government doesn’t “plan” for this stuff- but when your villages and towns are as densely populated as they are, it’s hard to move people to another place- especially if they’re mostly laborers or poor farmers that are very attached to their lands. Or, as we saw with Katrina, people simply refuse to believe that harm is coming their way and do not move as told to do so by government agencies.
Even more importantly, Indian infrastructure, as it stands currently, does not allow for large movements of people beforehand. Especially people who are unregistered with the local organizations- yes, everyone knows that the streets of Bombay are filled with the homeless on the roads, but which organization keeps track of these numbers? And if you don’t have these numbers, how do you plan for them?
Ahh, but one of the advantages of having floods every year is that you can solve it without moving people out every year. Instead, you have to build a drainage system.
But you don’t have to move people every year if you have an adequate plan. The goal is to work WITH nature, not against it. It’s not going to stop monsooning, so there are things you can plan for, e.g. creating stilted (secure) relief buildings, making sure homes have access to water sanitation tools (e.g. chlorine tablets). I’m sure there are more appropriate and cost-effective methods of providing aid; it seems to be largely a function of political will, not of plausibility.
If you think about what happens in Mumbai every monsoon, it comes as no surprise that not much attention is paid to Bihar’s travails in the monsoons. If they can’t be bothered about their heaviest tax-paying megalopolis, they wouldn’t be bothered about 19 million villagers.
Who is Camille, anyway, and why do I love her (her?) so much?
Ennis – Gotta blame it on something…
Oh agreed, absolutely. However, and this is where the infrastructure part of my comment comes in- where do you send all these homeless people that live on the streets, in the slums, in the shantytowns- where the highest numbers of victims are- while you’re building a drainage system for an area, where at least on paper, you don’t officially have people??
I’m interested in learning about the infrastructure situation in India; does anyone know of a good book or website with good analysis, and how the government is dealing with these problems?
So many people claim that India is a rising economic power .. great advances in technology and industry .. etc etc, but with a majority of the population living a rural, maybe backwards (in terms of technology, modernization) life, how can these claims come to fruition? It seems like the infrastructure problems are the #1 limiting factor for India’s growth.
Akil, I just checked out “In Spite of the Gods” (by Edward Luce) from the library 2 days ago. I haven’t started reading it yet, so can’t really recommend it, but it seems a likely candidate for the type of information you are seeking.
Are they? I don’t know where most of the death toll has been, but I had assumed it was in Assam and Bihar. My guess is that the homeless in Bombay can be reached by emergency services when something like this happens, but that’s not true of the rural poor. That’s part of why you need more information, planning and coordination.
I think the infrastructure question is great, because realistically it’s not cost-efficient (or even useful/effective), necessarily, to try and create new infrastructure networks. Honestly, I’m not familiar enough with monsoons to know the best method of planning, but having lived in rural/semi-rural regions in the global South (that were prone to flooding), I’ve seen examples of where communities got together and made an evacuation plan (that worked) versus ones where no one did anything and disease and death were rampant. I’m with Ennis; I think that the sheer predictability of both the frequency and growing intensity of monsoons makes this an issue worth pursuing at a government — be it municipal, local, state, or central — level.
(aside: I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t have any infrastructure, just that it takes a different kind of innovation to link people when they’re spread out and/or rural).
Akil, it’s not limited in scope to India, but Mike Davis’s Planet of Slums deals with this issue…
Nor is it limited to monsoons or slums. Quite different in scope, of course.
Been listening to NPR all morning and having lived thru the 3+ hour commuter hell thru a storm that apparently spawned a tornado in NYC of all things this is something that’s been on my mind all morning. Is global warming doing this? Are rising sea levels causing this for sure? Is it my perception or have weather related disasters increased in recent years? Is it me?
Also it seems flooding is something that happens every year in most of Bangladesh and entire swaths of the country are going under water. What gives? Is there a solution to this? Can it be prevented?
And please if NYC can’t function in 3 inches of rain I can’t imagine what it must be like to establish clear lines of communications and dispatch appropriate measures in countries like India and Bangladesh.
Climate change!
But heard about NYC this morning — it sounds totally insane.
Part of it has to do with population densities, people having the ability to communicate about such disasters, infrastructure corroding, local erosion of natural barriers (like swampland), deforestation, the earth’s natural cycle (orbits, wobble of axis), global warming. Something that kinda freaks me out is the flipping of the magnetic poles.
Weather analysis is some of the most complex number crunching stuff out there (hence supercomputers for the job).
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The question remains as to why India hasn’t done anything about harvesting rain water? I don’t think that it is such a daunting challenge of either the imagination or engineering. Doing so would address the problems of both flooding and draught. With Ennis’s permission, I am posting the link to an article I wrote last year when monsoon rains were causing similar havoc.
I thought that his been mandated for new buildings in Madras for some time now (since Jayalalitha’s time)?
I remember hearing grumbles about trying to interconnect rivers over a wide swath of territory to allow water to flow into other networks, ensuring the local ones don’t get overwhelmed.
In Gujarat, water from Narmada via it’s damn flows into other rivers as a part of maintaining those rivers (Sabarmati for example). It helps recharge the local acquifier and provides irrigation water for farms. Many say they’ve never seen so much water, all year round, in those rivers which went dry in summertime.
The project to interconnect rivers would be massive by any account. Other systems like the deep tunnel project in Chicago, which stores excess water underground (or the one in Japan) are very expensive, too. It would take a lot of investment in the infrastructure to allow for such a system to be implemented.
FWIW I interviewed UNICEF honcho Charles Lyons after the Guj earthquake. He said handling by the Indian govt was superb, the best he had seen and that the Ind govt had also worked v respectfully with local NGOs. He added all orphans were promptly adopted by neighbors. He said he had never seen anything like it.
But Mutineers perhaps prefer to mutiny, to criticise or exclaim about Indian stupidity rather than doing a single helpful thing?
Many kids born here seem to hate their brown hue (and India) when they feel so (white) American. Quite unlike the US Jewish or Chinese population.
Unrelated but could not resist!
For more kudos, even the BBC has admired the Kumbh Meal arrangements. Said they do not know how this massive festival is well organized.
Vera – why the defensiveness about Indian government performance? I didn’t criticize their performance after the Gujarat earthquake at all. What I did say was that both the response (on the Pakistani side) to the Kashmir earthquake and the response (in multiple countries) to the Tsumani showed that there was no coordination.
The Pakistani example is telling because the big international agencies had no desire to coordinate, and were quite opposed to the idea.
Why is it important to point that out? To make sure that the same mistakes aren’t made again.
Honestly, I’m puzzled by the way your responded. Nobody was engaging in blanket criticism of the GOI, why do you feel the need to engage in blanket defense?
The numbers are a joke. The sentence stating that the IAF has dropped supplies to 2 million people is undercut by the Post article that “helicopters dropped more than 4,300 food packets Monday in Bihar”. Assuming that each packet is about 1 lb, Bihar got about 2+ tons of food in one day. If 1 person needs at least 1 lb per day, you need about 1,000 tons per day to actually feed 2 million people. I have some passing knowledge of the IAF’s airlift capability, and there is no way 1,000 tons per day could even begin to be realized. It’s all just a show to make people think that the govt is “doing something”.
“is the gov refusing aid yet again?”
HRH, If you wish you can donate to the Indian Prime Minsiter’s Relief Fund.
There is severe flooding in Pakistan as well, mostly in Balochistan, and (initially?) very little aid arrived for the all the people who have lost homes there. Contrasted with the overwhelming aid for the people of Kashmir, it’s been taken as yet another snub from the rest of the country to the people of the poorest Pakistani province.