AIR Spotlight: Challenges of Heavy Rainfall and Management

AIR Spotlight is an insightful program featured daily on the All India Radio Newsonair. In this program, many eminent panelists discuss issues of importance which can be quite helpful in IAS exam preparation. This article features a discussion about the challenges of heavy rainfall and the ways to manage this disaster.

Participants: 

1. Tripti Parule, Former advisor NDMA.
2. Aditi Tandon, Journalist.

Context: Heavy rainfall has triggered a range of weather events in North and East India.

Details:

• More than 36 people have lost lives in the hilly regions of the north and the plains of East India due to heavy rainfall that has triggered a range of weather events like flash floods, landslides, etc.
• Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Odisha, and Jharkhand have experienced great loss in terms of life and property in previous weeks.
• These extreme events are increasing in both frequency and intensity.
• In the previous few months, various cases of landslides and cloudbursts have been reported. Cloudbursts have become a major phenomenon in the previous 10 years.
• In the number of landslide incidents, Kerala is at the top of the list. It is followed by Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, and Himachal Pradesh.
• Geological Survey of India has undertaken the work of National Landslide susceptibility mapping. This work started in 2014 and it has mapped 4 lakh 30 thousand sq. km. of different landslide-prone regions.

Factors responsible for extreme weather events:

• One of the prime reasons is the environmental changes that are taking place.
• The unprecedented construction activities that are going on in the hilly regions have made the region extremely vulnerable.
• Overcrowding and the excessive burden of the huge tourist influx especially on weekends is another factor. For instance, as per a report, 5000 vehicles enter Shimla on weekends.
• The geographical factors responsible for landslides are the terrain of the location, land use, and land cover.
• Blockage of drainage is also cited as an anthropogenic cause that aggravates the situation of landslides.

Associated challenges with heavy rainfall:

• Though rainfall can be predicted, the prediction of landslides in different terrains is difficult.
• Hurdles occur in these situations due to cloudbursts. For instance cloudbursts during the recent Amarnath yatra created great hurdles.
• In natural disasters, pre and post-disaster management can be done, but management during the disaster is a major difficulty.

Measures to be taken:

• Government should keep a check on the unbridled construction activities in the hilly terrains of Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, etc.
• It should be ensured that frequent warnings are issued to the local residents and tourists.
• The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) guidelines should be effectively implemented.
• Awareness of the local residents and proactive measures by the government can go a long way in mitigating the disaster.
• The awareness and warnings should also be circulated to nearby bigger cities so that the tourist influx does not go out of control.
• Creating spaces or an arena for deliberate discussion on disaster management.
• There should be increased plantations in these regions as they act as natural barriers by holding the soil and rocks together.
• Innovative approaches like the use of seed balls in inaccessible mountainous regions can help in increasing the tree cover.
• Involvement of the local populace, self-help groups, and panchayats can help in tackling the disaster.

Conclusion:

The close coordination between all the stakeholders beginning with the local residents, panchayats, to the state and central level executive is the need of the hour. The approach should be bottom-up for tackling such weather extremities. Also, it’s high time that environment and climate change become central to all policy decisions.

Read previous AIR Spotlight articles in the link.

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