Search

This study analyzes the news media coverage of floods in a major flood-prone state of India, Bihar. Although news media helps shape public perception and political actions, little analysis of this means of communication has been conducted in India. Major topics and issues discussed during the coverage of Bihar floods in years 2013, 2017, and 2019 were provision of food, shelter, and health facilities, failure of the transportation system, waterlogging in urban areas, and failure or management of embankments. There was no skepticism on whether climate change was real. Political parties took contradictory positions: the ruling party attributed floods to a changing climate but other parties, and news media, emphasized the lack of disaster mitigation actions and were uninterested in climate change. This study suggests that it is more important to prepare for disaster mitigation actions around the major issues discussed and communicate them to the public. Media should become a major stakeholder by questioning the authorities about disaster preparations prior to the monsoon season and communicating mitigation actions to the public once disaster has struck, and help both public and government to better manage and mitigate the disaster. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal sector actors played a key role in Mumbai's resilience to disastrous floods in 2005. Members of small-scale retail and service-sector businesses, the city's underclass, its waste workers and scrap dealers, and sundry individual tradespersons such as electricians, plumbers, masons, and sanitary workers were at the heart of recovery and rehabilitation in the weeks following the floods of July 2005. These floods not only affected significant parts of the city's new Central Business District (CBD) and business sectors but also its poor and marginalized communities that lived in environmentally fragile and marginal locations. Ironically, these actors have also been at the receiving end of distorted urban planning initiatives, real estate growth, bourgeois environmentalism-inspired middle-class activism, and ethnic chauvinist political forces, which have pushed them to the city's social, economic, and spatial margins. Hence, the aforementioned reasons have made the lives and livelihoods of these actors quite precarious and insecure. Going with recent sociological attempts to bridge the expanding field of disaster studies and classical sociological theorization by linking development theories to the study of disasters and their social implications, this paper argues for more imaginative disaster mitigation and management strategies that recognize the role of informal sector workers in post-disaster resilience. It is argued that this recognition should be accompanied by formal state-sponsored institutional inclusion and integration of informal sector workers and actors in disaster governance. In Mumbai, informal economic actors were characterized by resourcefulness, access to key networks in enabling recovery, flexibility and innovativeness in design and planning, and the ability to offer low-cost options which could be rapidly deployed. These tend to contrast with the slowness and cumbersome procedures and responses that typify formal state and private responses to disasters. Given the feeble response mechanisms of state institutions in disaster management and mitigation in much of the developing world, and the established fact of citizen action being the first to respond to disaster situations, this paper suggests that paying attention to and involving informal sector actors in disaster governance can both augment the quality of disaster management and enhance the possibility of greater integration of the city's marginalized and excluded groups into its mainstream social fabric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study the role played by mangrove ecosystems in minimising the impact of disasters like tsunami, floods and cyclones. A comparison of the studies concerning effective mitigation of tsunami and natural disasters by mangrove ecosystems was carried out for countries with special focus on India. A study about the role of mangroves across various states in India is also presented. The main findings, based on the literature review, are that mangroves occurring near the coast play an important role in the protection of the coast from the natural disasters like tsunami, floods, cyclones, sea level rise, etc. It is concluded that it is necessary to realise the dangers and consequences of undermining the services provided by the mangrove ecosystems in coastal protection and to conserve mangroves in every part of the world. The value of this paper lies in presenting an exhaustive review of the role played by mangroves in mitigating disasters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]