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Mainstreaming Urban Resilience in India
In the recent decades, India is witnessing an explosive growth rate in urbanisation and its associated vulnerability to disasters. Disaster management in India has district as the basic unit, while city as a complex system requires different strategies. The city civic authorities need to explore mechanisms to increase their resource allocations for disaster management as well as to bring in the enhanced skills of both institutions and community.
India, due to its geographical location, is highly vulnerable to disasters. Though we cannot prevent disasters from happening, we can greatly reduce their adverse impacts by better preparedness. For instance, a supercyclone in 1999 created havoc and resulted in the death of 9,843 people and severe destruction of infrastructure during its landfall in Odisha. About 14 years later, another equally powerful cyclone, named “Phailin,” also had its landfall in the same area of Odisha but with no more than 47 persons lost their lives. This significant reduction in the death rate was possible due to improved efforts of disaster risk management in our country, underlining the effectiveness of prevention and preparedness measures in minimising the loss of life (GFDRR 2013). However, the current disaster management model with the district as a unit and historical data-based vulnerability assessment has a grey area, that is, inadequate disaster management at the city level.
Vulnerability of Urban India
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