Children at a care home in Orissa in India. Children worldwide are particularly vulnerable in disasters. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS.

By Malini Shankar
DEHRADUN, India , Oct 2 2013 (IPS)

In Uttarakhand, the small Indian state in the Himalayan foothills that was a victim of flash floods that killed at least a thousand people in June this year and uprooted thousands of families, the story is told of a child who went every day to the helipad, believing his father will return when, in fact, the father died in the floods.

There are many such stories, Ray Kancharla of Save the Children told IPS.

Children are the most vulnerable when natural calamities strike. Children, women, the frail and infirm, and the elderly need special care and attention in disaster zones. Often they are unable to cope with the aftermath of a disaster, even if they have survived it, and might not be able to access search and rescue personnel, food aid, or relief material.

Separation is a trauma peculiar to children. Search and rescue workers, because of the emergency nature of their work, tend to be hurried. Often they do not have the time to check how many members of a family or group are still missing. Only visible survivors are picked up and evacuated to scattered shelters. Reunification becomes the task of disaster managers and relief agencies.

In January 2010, an earthquake struck Papua New Guinea, the small island state in the Pacific Ocean, and all the fatalities reported were helpless children because training in ‘disaster risk reduction’ had equipped adults with the knowledge that when the sea withdraws it heralds a deadly tsunami.

“No adult died because adults knew that when the sea withdraws [from the shore], it portends the arrival of a tsunami, and all the adults fled to higher ground,” said Aloysius Laukai of the New Dawn FM radio station. “The unfortunate casualties were all children,” Laukai told IPS.

“Mapping of the frail, infirm and elderly is very important in any disaster-prone area,” Aapga Singh of HelpAge India, an NGO dedicated to the elderly, told IPS after the Uttarakhand flood disaster. “It would not only be helpful to rescue these people in an efficient manner during emergencies, but also in relief disbursal; vulnerable people are either left behind or get in last.”

There are instances of children being separated from their parents and families during every recent natural calamity. The December 2004 Asian tsunami saw a seven-year -old girl separated from her family for nearly eight years before she was reunited with them in Sumatra in Indonesia only in 2012.

Even if public memory is short, trauma to the survivors can last a lifetime. Lessons learnt have to be documented in public domains to avoid recurrence of disasters in calamity-affected landscapes, say activists.

Separations have been rampant after the Asian tsunami, the Kosi floods in Bihar in India (2008), Cyclone Aila in Bangladesh and India (2009), a super cyclone in Orissa, India (1999), floods in Assam in India (2012), and the Uttarakhand floods (2013).

Trauma in children manifests itself in ways such as “thumb sucking, bedwetting, clinging to parents, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, fear of the dark, regression in behaviour, and withdrawal from friends and routines,” Murali Kunduru of Plan India, an NGO, told IPS.

With loss of appetite manifesting in children suffering from separation-induced trauma, the significance of culture-sensitive food security assumes critical importance.

Apart from the primary trauma of separation, and battle for survival against the power of calamities, women and children are particularly vulnerable to lack of water and sanitation.

”Without adequate nutritious food, both children and adults lose immunity and become predisposed to water-borne infections and sicknesses like “diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid, respiratory infections, skin and eye infections which are all likely to occur when water supply and sanitation services are disrupted during disasters,” adds Kunduru.

When nursing mothers are rendered homeless because of disasters, they need to be housed in shelters which have gender sensitivity and adequate privacy. Similarly shelters need to conform to the needs of physically challenged persons – ramps for wheelchair-bound refugees have to be factored in during their construction.

In the Uttarakhand floods, the tourist economy was hit so hard that people dependent on tourism for their livelihood migrated to larger cities and towns in the plains to seek employment.

“Children’s education is affected by disasters when adults migrate in search of livelihoods, often leaving adolescent boys in charge of families; young children, especially boys, drop out of school to earn a livelihood, disrupting their education resulting in lifelong impact,” says Shekhar Ambati of Aide et Action.

With women moving out of kitchens to supplement family incomes being earned by their young wards, children’s nutrition suffers.

“As part of our working paper on development-induced displacement we found that around 25 percent of children had to drop out of school. This is one of the risks to the population due to displacement,” writes Dr. K Hemalatha, a community worker, in a working paper on development-induced displacement, co-authored by Fr. Arun Anthony and Pitambari Joshalkar and published by Christ University, Bangalore. The study was funded by the International Federation of Catholic Universities.

Often the lack of inclusivity rebounds on the vulnerable during disasters. Planning can go a long way in efficient disaster mitigation. Database management of population, knowledge of consumption patterns, standards of living and human development index have to go into planning to mitigate the effect of disasters, particularly on children and the vulnerable in calamity-prone areas, say activists.

Melting glaciers are wreaking havoc in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. Credit: Malini Shankar/IPS

By Malini Shankar
UTTARKASHI, India, Jul 27 2013 (IPS)

Over a month after flash floods in the Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in north India left 1,000 dead and 6,000 missing, the government has yet to release a full agricultural impact assessment, sparking fears about the extent of damage to the region’s farmland.

Questions remain as to how soon soil restoration efforts will fructify and when the farm economy, which accounted for just under 11 percent of the state’s 160-billion-dollar gross domestic product (GDP) in 2012-2013 will be restored to functionality.

Heavy flooding on Jun. 15-16, the result of torrential rains and glacial leaks in the Himalayas, wreaked havoc on Uttarakhand, as the headstreams of the holy River Ganga swelled and swept away roads, homes, scores of pilgrims, cattle and buildings.

With the government focusing its efforts almost entirely on an emergency rescue and relief operation coordinated by the armed forces (with over 42,000 rescues under its belt to date), the plight of farmers has been largely ignored.

Experts from the region say the summer crops have been washed out and the farms are in no shape to yield a winter harvest this year; the sowing season for rice, which coincides with the height of the monsoon (June to September) has been delayed as a result of heavy inundation of paddy fields caused by downpours and landslides.

Though agricultural fields are routinely inundated with the clay that runs down surrounding mountains during summer glacial melts and the annual monsoon, this latest calamity has created a disaster zone in what is frequently referred to as the “land of the gods”.

“It is possible that the top soil may have been altered for a considerably longer duration of time than expected,” Ram Kishan, regional emergency manager of South Asia for the UK-based NGO Christian Aid, told IPS.

This Himalayan state, irrigated naturally by perennial glacier-fed rivers, boasts a high degree of agricultural diversity. Rajma, or red kidney beans, and potatoes comprise the staple diet of the majority of Uttarakhand’s native population of 10 million people, according to the 2011 census.

Crops like rice, wheat, barley, millets, lentils, pulses, potatoes, fruits, vegetables, flowers, spices, herbs and mushrooms have been drowned by the floods, while debris from landslides has also compromised the grazing pastures of the state’s roughly 11.9 million heads of livestock, including cows, bullocks, buffaloes, sheep, goats, horses, pigs, hens, chickens and other birds like geese.

“Initial estimates suggest that 25 to 30 percent of cultivation has been affected,” said Kishan; this represents a huge chunk of the state’s average annual production of 8.2 million tonnes.

NGOs like Christian Aid fear that the resulting price rise in all essential commodities, like vegetables, fruits, milk, dairy products, cereals, lentils and pulses, in the near term will adversely affect the average farming family.

Over 65 percent of Uttarakhand’s residents, most of them subsistence farmers with small landholdings of less than a single hectare per family, are dependent on agriculture, according to Aide et Action.

Farmers and tourism

Farmers dependent on seasonal tourism to supplement their incomes during the monsoon months are particularly affected.

Uttarakhand is a popular destination for foreign tourists and local pilgrims alike: “Forty-seven million domestic tourists and (half a) million foreign tourists were expected in the current fiscal year”, according to Shekhar Ambati at Aide et Action. But the flash floods, he said, eroded this economic base.

The tourism industry is one of the largest employers in the region, hiring locals as porters, guides, drivers, naturalists and translators. Others rent out their mules, offering tourists rides on rocky terrain in order to earn their daily bread.

The tourist economy also supports local artisans and makers of traditional handicrafts, opens up jobs as caterers and cooks through the hospitality sector and enables families to establish small businesses like tea stalls, souvenir shops or grocery stores.

Ambati fears that the destruction of the “lifeline of religious tourism” will snowball, affecting the number of tourists arriving in the region and further endangering farmers’ incomes.

Quoting small business owners and vegetable sellers at the main market in the town of Rudraprayag, Eila Jafar of Care India told IPS that farmers are already starting to feel the crunch of scant agricultural yields.

“The number of daily wage labourers coming to the main market has reduced to a great extent,” Jafar told IPS.

Road conditions have deteriorated significantly since the floods: some roads were washed away altogether and others have been made impassable by debris, which is having an extremely “negative impact on the market and economy,” Jafar added.

Farmers who relied on the tourist infrastructure to sell their produce are among the worst affected.

“The state’s chamber of commerce and industry estimates that Uttarakhand has lost revenue earnings of over 20 billion dollars from its tourism sector alone in the current fiscal year on account of torrential rains that devastated the state,” says Ambati.

With tourism unlikely to recover for two to three years at least, the situation calls for “intervention” from the government to ensure that farmers have food and livelihood security in the short term.

(END)