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Top1. Introduction
Disaster is a sudden calamitous event that seriously disrupts the functioning of a community or society and causes human, material, and economic or environmental losses that exceed the community’s or society’s ability to cope using its own resources. Though often caused by nature, disasters can have human origins. Each year millions of people receive emergency relief items from humanitarian organizations following disasters and crises. While significant time and resources have been invested in identifying the needs of affected populations and how to address those needs, significantly less focus has been given to environmental impacts of these response operations. These impacts can result in substantial negative outcomes, causing harm to the same populations humanitarian organizations are attempting to serve. In response, humanitarian organizations have developed environmental mainstreaming approaches to mitigate these unintended impacts. Disaster Management refers to how we can protect or preserve maximum number of lives and property during a natural disaster. Disaster management plans are multi-layered and are aimed to address issue such as floods, hurricanes, fires, and even mass failure of utilities or the rapid spread of disease. India has been traditionally vulnerable to the natural disasters on the account of its unique geo-climatic conditions. Floods, droughts, cyclones, earthquakes and landslides would have been recurrent phenomena. About 59% of the landmass is prone to earthquakes of various intensities; over 40 million area is prone to floods; about 8% of the total area is prone to cyclones and 69% of the area is susceptible to drought. In the decade 1990-2000, an average of about 4344 people lost their lives and about 30 million people were affected by disasters every year. The loss in terms of private, community and public assets has been astronomical. At the global level, there has been considerable concern over natural disasters. Even as substantial scientific and material progress is made, the loss of lives and property due to disasters has not decreased. In fact, the human toll and economic losses have mounted up. It was in this background that the United Nations General Assembly, in 1989, declared the decade 1990-2000 as the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction with the objective to reduce loss of lives and property and restrict socio-economic damage through concerted international action, was specially certified in developing countries. The super cyclone in Odissa in October, 1999 and the Bhuj earthquake in Gujarat in January, 2001 underscored the need to adopt a multi-dimensional endeavour involving diverse scientific, engineering, financial and social processes; the need to adopt multi disciplinary and multi-sectoral approach and incorporation of risk reduction in the developmental plans and strategies. Over the past 2 years, the Government of India have brought about a paradigm shift in the approach to disaster management. The new approach proceeds from the conviction that development cannot be sustainable unless disaster mitigation is built into the development process. Another corner stone of the approach is that mitigation has to be multi-disciplinary spanning across all sectors of development. The new policy also emanates from the belief that investments in mitigation are much more cost effective than expenditure on relief and rehabilitation. Disaster management occupies an important place in this country's policy framework as it is the poor and the under-privileged who are worst affected on account of calamities/disasters.