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Courtesy: Daily Dawn

Non-fiction: The disasterscape 

Reviewed by Mufti Jamiluddin Ahmad

 
Vulnerable India is an outstanding research on calamities and their disastrous consequences for communities that they befall. The book researches the underprivileged, the poor, the disadvantaged and the disabled, dissecting how they are affected by natural disasters.
These natural disasters include earthquakes, floods, hailstorms, landslides, heat waves and even thunderstorms whose impact goes beyond what statistics predict and what governmental departments dish out.

The book investigates how such disasters have ruined and wiped out the underprivileged and the disadvantaged and their generations for years to come. The author feels that calling them ‘natural' may be a misnomer because these disaster situations emanate from the country's ‘weak infrastructure, corrupt leadership and a complacent civil society.'

While this omnibus disaster situation worsens, relief agencies, media and even the state bureaucracy continue to treat each disaster as an isolated event — an act of nature. At a time when Pakistan is facing the immediate and long-term effects of perhaps the worst floods in its history, the book can be quite helpful in understanding and adjusting to long-term effects to restrict colossal tragedies. In fact we have to identify the origins of the problem and how they tend to become greatly destructive due to our own ineptitude and the callousness shown for the underprivileged.

The author evaluates India's continual failure to effectively lessen the damage to life and property which could have been avoided through proper planning. The book deals with many aspects of the dilemmas caused by such tragedies. Certainly, apart from fields like disaster management, geography and geology, the present thesis falls into the genre of environmental sociology, social work and development studies while also providing important guidelines to policymakers in India, and even in Pakistan.

The study provides a panoramic socio-economic analysis of 16 different geophysical across 594 districts of India, spanning an area of 3.29 million kilometers. It investigates floods, earthquakes, hailstorms, thunderstorms, droughts, dust storms, cyclones, flashfloods, heat waves, heavy rainfall, lightning, snowfall, gales, cold waves and cloudbursts. The author also visits various set ideas and beliefs about these natural disasters, taking the reader into historical, sometimes almost metaphysical scenarios that highlight existing beliefs about these calamities.

The book is about what the author terms as the ‘disasterscape', a situation where human life is lost or damaged, relationships ripped and livelihoods disrupted. (‘The disasterscape builds at a frequent pace in India. Here every month is a month of disaster. There are no holidays.') The concept of vulnerability in this respect has been measured in terms of components and indicators under categories such as disadvantaged people which include female illiterates, marginal workers, agricultural labourers, scheduled castes and the disabled population. The author points out that the population ‘vulnerable to disasters is double than that of the population that lives below the poverty line.' He emphasizes that while poverty may have been reduced over the years, vulnerability is still high.

According to the world disaster report, low-income economies form three-fourths of the population which have been killed in disasters. During the period 1982-2002, almost one half of them were affected by disasters. In contrast, high income economies, which represent only one-fourth of the countries, possess only two per cent of those killed and hardly one per cent of the affected.

The book has been a research project undertaken by Anu Kapur, an associate professor of geography and a former Fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. The foreword to the book states that Vulnerable India has come at a time when a number of books glorifying India with titles such as Eternal India, Emerging India, Timeless India have appeared, thereby ‘striking a different chord.'

The foreword also points out that it will reshape prevalent views on the genesis of disasters. ‘The phrase “Vulnerable India” is not an uncommitted neutral description. It is a reasoned judgment of concern. Human at its very core. It awaits a human response.'

Vulnerable India: A geographical study of disasters
(RESEARCH)
By Anu Kapur
Sage Publications, India
ISBN 9788132100775
300pp. Indian Rs850

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