The recovery can be an opportunity to set new standards in governance by creating the conditions for breaking free from the regressive trends of bureaucratic centralisation as well as excessive politicisation of the local institutions. Instead, they should get back their decision-making powers
The Kerala floods of 1924 and 2018 are very different. The extreme rainfall and deluge of 2018 could very well be termed as a key anthropocene event. Since anthropocene signifies the epoch-marking significant human impact on the earth, particularly on the ecosystem and the climate system, there are possibly many reasons to justify such a characterisation.
It would be preposterous in 2018 to exclaim that the deluge was as unexpected as it was nearly 100 years ago. There is a huge knowledge base that appears to have either been not imbibed or selectively overlooked. Perhaps, unlike 1924, today there is also an eagerness to look ahead despite the unimaginable losses by making a break with the past, albeit one that is clouded in vagueness.
It is as if Kerala is poised at a cognitive cusp where the vagueness in the perceptions of development needs to be replaced with clarity. While it may take a while for a consensus to emerge on what would constitute such a break and what must be aimed at in the betterment reconstruction, a healthy and constructive discussion on various aspects of the disaster, recovery and betterment reconstruction is necessary to facilitate the emergence of a consensus or, at least a broadly acceptable understanding of what is envisioned as the Nava Keralam (New Kerala).
Challenges of Reorienting Development
The rare extreme weather events like the heavy rainfall spell of 1924 are more likely to occur under different scenarios of human-induced global climate change. It clearly shows that a certain ensemble of hydro-meteorological conditions will give rise to a certain type of rainfall pattern – characterised broadly in terms of intensity, quantum and spread.
What make the extreme weather events into a nearly catastrophic disasters are the ecological changes, risks and vulnerabilities created by development. Both in a wider and a narrow sense, there are multiple and layered human-induced drivers behind three distinct aspects: a) the extreme rainfall b) the nature of flood and c) the disastrous impacts.
As noted in the special report on extreme events prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2012, scientific community now has considerable confidence in asserting that the anthropogenic climate change has significantly modified the frequency of extreme weather events. Yet, there have not been notable initiatives to factor that or the climate change scenarios into hazard and risk assessment or the early warning systems.
While there have been massive alterations in the riverine hydrology due to the construction of a large network of dams, in India there has not been matching enhancement in the scientific knowledge relating to the behaviour of the combined system of dams impounding massive quantities of water, their catchment areas, altered capacity of the rivers that have ceased to have normal water flows and the downstream floodplains that are spared the occasional flooding episodes.
There are 62 large dams in Kerala as per India’s National Register of Large Dams compiled by the Central Water Commission.
Nevertheless, Kerala does not have a significant flood forecasting system or even an integrated data management system for the reservoir network, rivers and the catchments.
Reliable inflow forecasting is needed for sound reservoir management, which is possible only when accurate quantitative rainfall forecast is available. Reliable quantitative forecasting of catchment area-wise rainfall is not available for the dams in Kerala.
There are also many inter-agency coordination issues – intra-state and inter-state – that are crucially important to effective flood management, providing adequate warnings and ultimately saving lives.
The intra-state inter-agency problems arise from the absence of a centralised flood monitoring mechanism and the division of management responsibilities of reservoirs between two agencies – irrigation department and the electricity board.
There is hardly any doubt that the alterations in the geomorphology of the floodplains and cumulative effect of land-use changes across Kerala massively aggravated the disaster arising from an extreme weather event.
Kerala was one of the first coastal states to demand an exception from the stringent Coastal Regulation Zone Act when it was notified arguing that Kerala is placed in an unusual geographic situation. Despite changes in political leadership, the state has consistently discounted ecological concerns and has witnessed irreversible damages to its ecosystems.
The Western Ghats region is one of the 36 global biodiversity hotspots, i.e., Earth’s most biologically rich but threatened terrestrial regions. In many ways, the Western Ghats provides invaluable ecosystem services at a macro scale to Kerala and several other states. Cutting across the political divides, all these are hardly recognised in Kerala’s development thinking.
Rather, there has been aggressive reluctance to accept almost all the key suggestions for reorienting development in an ecologically sensitive direction. This was evident in the widespread non-acceptance of the Gadgil Committee report. Instead of an enlightened consensus on a sustainable development framework that Kerala had the potential to embark on, the state is following development options in which climate change risks and ecological imperatives get very little attention.
Envisioning a new path
A large-scale disaster opens windows of opportunity to build back better. There is an emerging consensus of sorts on the need to build a ‘New Kerala’ that is far more resilient to disasters, informed by ecology and enriched by compassion seen in the aftermath of the deluge.
It is important that the temptation for speedy recovery should not lead to the abandoning the desire to make a significant break with the past. There are bound to be contests among differing visions of the ‘nava Keralam’ and it is likely that such contests could exhaust the patience of those seeking those in a hurry to rebuild as well as those wanting to press on quickly with their visions almost unilaterally.
If a developmental break and a cognitive pause are to be realised, intensive debates need to be facilitated across the state – in both disaster-affected and unaffected – areas within a short but adequate timeframe that would not test the patience excessively of the affected.
The political leadership must be vigilant of the dangers of big consulting firms dominating that space narrowing the path for open-ended debates or the possibility of shutting all doors for truly participatory consultations involving local institutions, people’s organizations and civil society.
The task of successfully implementing large recovery programmes are usually seen as a top-down effort where the project management expertise of consulting firms is assumed to be indispensable and accepted almost as an unavoidable evil, as it were. This is the preferred approach of the financing agencies like the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. If necessary, such services should be procured through robust competitive processes.
However, facilitating debates and consultations needed for envisioning the nava Keralam is beyond the domain expertise of any management consulting firm.
There is a growing body of criticism of the big consulting firms cautioning that the overbearing involvement of such firms leads to the privatization of public policy-making besides raising troubling questions how it entails inherent risks of undermining democratic decision-making in the absence of adequate safeguards.
Based on merits, government may accept any pro bono offers. However, services provided gratis by any agency should not become one in which the agency creates an obligations-free role for itself occupying the pole position as the exclusive management node for the recovery programe without entering through a competitive route. Rather than accept offers unconditionally, the state government should process even pro bono offers through a competitive process.
Deepening Democracy
Given the vitality of civil society initiatives and strengths of the institutions of local self-governance – conditions rarely existing in many disaster-affected areas, the debates over diverse visions of the new state and society must be through a wide participatory process involving the disaster-affected communities, civil society and the institutions of local self-governance.
The recovery process and the long-term building back better provide an unusual opportunity for returning to the roots of truly participatory decision-making. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction adopted in 2015 by the World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction emphasizes the role of governance.
The recovery can be an opportunity to set new standards in governance by creating the conditions for breaking free from the regressive trends of bureaucratic centralisation as well as excessive politicisation of the local institutions.
The state’s political leadership ought to give back to the local institutions many of the decision-making powers they have gradually lost. If Kerala manages to deepen the democracy and empower the local self-governance institutions through the post-deluge build back better, it will become a unique global model in post-disaster reconstruction.
(The author worked as senior scientist in Gujarat Institute of Desert Ecology, Bhuj-Kachch, Gujarat. Was involved in post-earthquake environmental assessments in Gujarat and in the preparation of disaster management plans and vulnerability assessments)
