There is a consensus among officials that a new tool to gauge climatic loss and damage should be embraced; but they say the transition will be challenging
INDIA
Farmers dry their paddy crop on a road in Morigaon district, Assam, on May 24. Assam witnessed widespread floods across its network of rivers this year, affecting more than 30 of the state’s 35 districts, and impacting over
5 million people. The state estimated the disaster to have cost around R4,416 crore. Floods are chronic in the state, but their intensity and frequency have increased. A fresh spell of rain later in early October led to another wave of flood, affecting five districts (Photograph: Reuters) Rain conjures hope in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region. Its eight districts are predominantly rainfed and are among the most drought-prone areas in the country. Monsoon failures and chronic farmer suicides bring the region national notoriety. This year, the monsoon season was different. The region received bountiful rains, and yet farmers lost their crops; scores of them even took their lives.
Between July and September, 4.5 million farmers in Marathwada saw rain wash away their standing crops from 0.38 million hectares (ha), an area more than double the size of Delhi, informs the office of divisional commissioner at Aurangabad, Maharashtra.
Even before the news of crop loss could spread, in June, 108 farmers in Marathwada died by suicide. July saw 83 suicides, while August reported the highest 114 suicides and September 90 such incidences. This means three farmers from the region died by suicide every day during this monsoon season.
The situation was particularly acute in Maharashtra’s Nanded district, which saw a two-fold rise in farmer suicides during the monsoon season — eight farmers died by suicide in July, 26 in August and 22 in September. This was the highest spike in farmers’ suicides in the region, which coincided with the monsoon’s erratic progress that oscillated between dry and wet spells.
According to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), Nanded received 135 per cent and 501 per cent excess rainfall in the fourth week of June and first week of July, respectively. The trend continued in the second (210 per cent excess) and third weeks (67 per cent excess) of July.
Farmers usually sow seeds in early June, and excess rain destroyed most of the saplings. Since seeds account for 40 per cent of crop input costs, most small and marginal farmers could not resow their fields.
Only the ones with money, or access to credit, went in for late sowing. Even that did not help. Rainfall stopped abruptly in the last week of July, ushering in an unexpected month-long dry spell that continued till the first week of September.
And then, in the next week, the district received 247 per cent excess rainfall. Kiran Gade of Himayatnagar village in Nanded says the September rains eroded the soil to the extent that farmers in his village might not be able to grow crops in the next few seasons.
On September 30, IMD announced the monsoon report card, claiming that the season was normal for the country, with six per cent excess rainfall. The reality is most parts of the country have experienced extremes like Marathwada.
At the end of the season, 188 districts, or 27 per cent of the country, reported deficit rainfall (20-59 per cent less than normal), and seven received large deficient rainfall (60-99 per cent less than normal). The states that received deficit rainfall include Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Assam, Haryana, Delhi and Punjab.
The case of Uttar Pradesh was particularly unusual. The overall monsoon in the country’s most populous state remained deficient even after receiving 193 per cent excess rainfall in the last week of September. Shortly after, the state got flooded.
On October 5, three of its districts received 10,000 per cent excess rainfall. Shravasti district received 176.8 mm rains, against the normal of 2.4 mm. On October 11, IMD released data that suggests that in the first 10 days of the month, the country received 80 per cent excess rainfall; Uttar Pradesh reported 689 per cent excess rain.
Apart from damaging crops, the unexpected rains in October also dashed farmers’ hopes of receiving compensation for the crops lost due to deficit rainfall during the season.
On August 20, the relief commissioner of the Uttar Pradesh revenue department submitted a document to the chief minister’s office urging it to consider declaring a mid-season drought, which is extremely rare.
While the state took some immediate measures such as waiving off electricity costs for borewells, it never announced a drought. The discussion fizzled out after the rains.
The monsoon was not the only erratic season this year. Weather vagaries were visible in the winter and pre-monsoon seasons as well. In the first 273 days of this year (January-September), India experienced extreme weather events on 242 days, according to an analysis by Down To Earth Data Centre.-6.jpg "Infographics: Sanjit")
What India has witnessed so far in 2022 is the new normal in a warming world. A 2020 report by the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction says globally, there has been “a sharp increase [in disasters] over the previous twenty years”. India reported the third highest number of natural disasters during this period.
Between 1995 and 2020 (till October), India recorded 1,058 climatic disaster events (floods, cyclones, droughts, cold waves and heatwaves), says a September 2021 report by National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM). It says the country has seen an “increasing pattern for both hydro-meteorological [floods, droughts and others] and biological disasters [disease outbreak].”
The disasters result in huge economic losses. The World Meteorological Organization, in its “State of the Climate in Asia” report, says that in 2020 India lost US $87 billion due to disasters.
The UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific projects that for 2020-59 “India is set to record an average annual loss of $225 billion”. But for those affected by these disasters, the future only brings increased vulnerability due to inadequate assessment of loss and damage.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in its working definition of loss and damage says that it is “negative effects of climate variability and climate change that people have not been able to cope with or adapt to”.
This is the situation of most farmers in Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh who do not have the capacity to “cope or adapt to” extreme weather events. A farmer household in Maharashtra has more outstanding loan than their annual income.
Over 54 per cent of the farmer households in Maharashtra are indebted and the average outstanding loan per household is Rs 82,085, according to the National Statistical Office 2019 survey on “Land and Livestock Holdings of Households and Situation Assessment of Agricultural Households”.
With each crop failure, the debt burden increases. According to the “Farmers Suicides in Marathwada Region of India: A Causative Analysis”, a research published in the International Journal of Current Microbiology and Applied Sciences, 2019, out of the 320 farmer suicides studied between 2010 and 2017, about 76 per cent of the farmers died by suicide due to increased indebtedness.
Crop failure amounted to over 87 per cent of the suicide cases in the Marathwada region. The average per capita annual income of these observed cases was about Rs 74,576.
India has a mechanism for assessing disaster damages, which is, in simple terms, the immediate cost of a disaster. However, it lacks a robust infrastructure to assess the more holistic losses that arise from it. The existing system is centred around relief and offers little to rebuild an area and its economy post-disaster. The focus is changing, but the transition is likely to take a while.
The process of assessing damages varies from state to state, though the broad principles remain the same. The district administration is the nodal agency that ropes in other departments such as health, revenue, agriculture, and agencies such as the national and state disaster response forces and the Army, says Manoj Ranjan, commissioner, Karnataka State Disaster Management Authority.
The ground team does the initial assessment while carrying out relief work. Post disaster, the information is verified and uploaded into the National Disaster Information Management System. The numbers are re-verified, and the compensation is released.
“The first round of assessment is of houses, cattle, agriculture and crops. Our priority is to give some ex-gratia amount to the people affected. The exercise is completed a month after a disaster ends,” says GD Tripathi, secretary of the Assam State Disaster Management Authority. Then, the damage to schools, hospitals and government buildings is assessed.
There are three major problems with the system: it does not cover all the affected sectors that are crucial for quick recovery; the compensation is seldom enough; and it gives the ideas of recovery and resilience a miss.
The Norms of Assistance, a document that is used to calculate the economic cost of a disaster, was last revised in 2015. This is the reason state governments announce additional compensation packages in times of a disaster.
“As per the current compensation rate, a farmer gets only Rs 100 per coconut tree, which takes 15-20 years to mature,” says Sekhar Lukose Kuriakose, member secretary, Kerala State Disaster Management Authority. The state government, as a result, pays an additional Rs 600 per coconut tree damaged at the time of a disaster.
Overall, the existing mechanism leaves recovery and resilience almost exclusively to the initiative and capacity of each affected person. As a result, people resort to rebuilding their homes and other assets applying lower standards of quality and using inadequate construction materials. In the end, disaster risk, rather than being reduced, increases.
The country has realised the limitations of the existing system, and is slowly transitioning to a more robust assessment tool called post-disaster needs assessment. The idea of the internationally accepted assessment tool is to build back better after every disaster.
This is achieved by following four distinct steps. Creating a baseline of all the regions of the country, at least till the district level, to help the assessors know what kind of socio-economic system existed before the disaster. Next comes assessment of the immediate loss and damage, which India is already doing with reasonable success.
Third is assessment of the broader impact of the disaster on the macroeconomy (such as the impact of the state GDP and tax receipts) and on households and communities (such as the loss of household income due to the closing down of factories). And finally, a needs assessment is carried out to identify a full-fledged development plan that goes beyond the disaster and makes the region resilient.
Post-disaster needs assessments have been around globally since 2008 and India used it for the first time during the Kerala floods of 2018.
The state government took the help of four international agencies—Asian Development Bank, World Bank, EU Civil and Humanitarian Aid, and the UN—to carry out the assessment.
The final report, accessed by DTE, shows that the damages caused by the floods was worth Rs 10,577 crore, but the amount needed for the total recovery from the disaster was three times more at Rs 30,715 crore.
“We started the Rebuild Kerala Development Programme on the basis of the post-disaster needs assessment and got funding from the international agencies,” says Kuriakose. The methodology was again used in 2019 during cyclone Fani in Odisha.
The final report shows that while the damages from the event was Rs 16,465 crore, the total cost was Rs 29,315 crore. “With the help of the post-disaster needs assessment, we formulated the Odisha Disaster Recovery Project,” says Gyana Das, executive director, Odisha State Disaster Management Authority.
The tool is currently being used only for major disasters, but India plans to make it an integral part of all disasters.
“This year, it has been adopted by eight states—Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Odisha and Meghalaya—to assess floods. In another three years, we will see this being used for all disasters in the country,” says Kumar Vatsa, member of the National Disaster Management Authority.
In 2019, NIDM released a two-volume post-disaster needs assessment manual, which has altered the global best practices to suit the country.
While there is a consensus among state officials that the tool should be embraced, they say the transition will be challenging. The country’s administrative setup, for example, is not in line with the tool’s guidelines, a point clearly mentioned in the manual.
All post-disaster needs assessments must be carried out across nine sectors as pre-defined under the globally-accepted System of National Accounts. This is crucial to make the assessments comparable.
The problem for India is that multiple government departments are responsible for each of the sectors. The activities mentioned under the agriculture, forestry and fisheries sector are carried out by five ministries and departments. This overlapping of departments can cause problems in data collection and baseline creation.
India will also struggle with creating baselines, which require historical data for the disaster-affected region and the most recent forecasts available on the same variables for the current and subsequent years of the disaster.
Shairi Mathur of UNDP, who was part of the assessment conducted on the 2018 Kerala floods, recalls that baseline gaps were rampant in remote villages, particularly in the worst-affected districts of Wayanad, Idukki, Alappuzha, and Pathanamthitta. “It was difficult to find documentation for pucca households at the rural level and determine their worth,” she says.
There are concerns over the efficacy of the tool in assessing slow-onset disasters like droughts that affect a large area and cause massive losses, but little structural damage. India is yet to use it for a drought and even globally, of the 55 post-disaster needs assessments conducted since 2008, only two were on droughts, suggests a 2018 World Bank report.
But the most important question is: Will this assessment tool translate into more funds for loss and damage—either from the Centre or international agencies such as the World Bank? India is trying to achieve this ideal.
In February 2021, the 15th Finance Commission for the first time, made a provision for recovery and reconstruction in the national disaster management budget. “This new addition increased the disaster management budget by 100 per cent from the 14th Finance Commission; It grew from Rs 62,000 crore then to Rs 1,60,153 crore now,” says Vatsa.
It has also introduced a new state disaster mitigation fund and bifurcated the existing state disaster relief fund for three functions: response and relief, recovery and reconstruction, and preparedness and capacity-building.
The country has also been vocal in its support for a global mechanism for transferring loss and damage funds from the developed world to developing countries. This is expected to be one of the core discussions at the upcoming 27th Conference of Parties to UNFCCC in Sharm el-Shaikh, Egypt.
(With inputs from Himanshu N, Raju Sajwan and Vivek Mishra)
This was first published in the 1-15 November, 2022 edition of Down To Earth
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