Thiruvananthapuram | The State of Kerala which is currently suffering from one of the worst natural calamities which have occurred since the last 100 years. More the 400 people have died since June and the state has already suffered a loss of 2000 crores. Idukki, Malappuram, Kottayam and Ernakulam districts being the worst affected due to floods.
Addressing a press conference on Monday, Kerala Chief Minister Pinayari Vijayan said, “Tough days are ahead, Over a million people are in the relief camps and as of now they are our priority. We are assessing human and material damage.” According to research conducted by the Kerala government more than one lakh buildings, which includes people’s houses, have been damaged, over 10,000km of highways and roads and hundreds of bridges have been washed away, and crops in millions of hectares of land have been lost in the Kerala floods.
As per the 2015 paper by Prakash Tripathi of Ambedkar University, titled ‘Flood Disaster in India: An analysis of trend and Preparedness’, completion of relief and rehabilitation work takes about two years on average while the ecological recovery could take up to more than five years. In the case of Kerala, it could take more than a decade to bring the normal life to stability.
Speaking to media an IMD official citing the real cause of such high level of destruction in Kerala said, “Yes, the rainfall was extremely heavy; much more than Kerala receives at this time of the year. However, the IMD (Indian Meteorological Department) had predicted that the extremely heavy rainfall was very likely and the state should have taken the decision to release water from the dams that were almost filled when the rains started subsidy in July.
Experts giving an example of the rehabilitation process said the Bihar government is still struggling to provide relief to the farmers from the impact of 2008 Kosi river floods. Kosi river flood on the Indo-Nepal border in 2008, around 3.3 million people were affected in the single state of Bihar. Around 527 people were dead and 6.6 million hectares of agricultural land became unfit for cultivation.
While addressing the 2013 Uttarakhand floods in the Mandakini and Alaknanda rivers which affected over 9 million and killed over 200people, Amit Singh Negi, secretary disaster management told media that the state received around 1000 crore for the relief work form the union government, however, the reconstructions of the roads are still under process.
As reported in Hindustan Times, World Bank aided Kosi Flood Recovery Project of $220 million, was scheduled to be completed by September 2014, however it got extended to June 2018. According to Himanshu Thakkar, South Asia Network of Dams, Rivers and People, “We have to learn from Kerala that just development big storage dams may not help. When it rains heavily, the dam gates have been opened which results in excessive flooding. Instead, we need to work on flood management, which basically means removing encroachments from traditional water flow zones and allowing excess water to flow smoothly into oceans.”
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