Making infrastructure disaster resilient

India has indeed taken proactive steps. The base is well set to push the agenda aggressively

Disasters strike India, as they do elsewhere. When they do, infrastructure services stop, adding to the hardship of citizens as water, power, mobile and Internet services are not restored fast enough. Transport links get snapped and communities are cut off for days. Rebuilding takes time. Chennai floods, Himalayan flash floods, Gujarat and Nepal earthquakes, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophes at Chernobyl and Fukushima are all etched in collective memory.
 

The mitigation for all this is to plan and build “Disaster Resilient Infrastructure” (DRI), and gear up for “Disaster Risk Reduction” (DRR). DRI and DRR are phrases that are increasingly being heard in the corridors of power, international workshops, seminars, and United Nations declarations.
 

On December 23, 2005, the government of India enacted the Disaster Management Act, which envisaged the creation of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), headed by the prime minister, and State Disaster Management Authorities (SDMAs) headed by respective chief ministers, to spearhead and implement a holistic and integrated approach to disaster management in India.

A wave of fresh thinking on DRI and DRR came in from the “Sendai framework for Disaster Risk Reduction” that was adopted by the United Nations in 2015 for the next 15 years. Sendai is a Japanese city that was chosen because it recovered fast from the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi released the National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP), India’s first ever national plan, on June 1, 2016. This is based on the Sendai Framework, and embraces departments at all levels at the Centre, state, district, town and panchayat. The thematic areas covered are risk assessment, inter-agency coordination, investing in DRI and DRR, and capacity building.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi (in picture with his cabinet colleagues) released the National Disaster Management Plan, India’s first ever national plan, on June 1, 2016

The plan outlines 15 disasters, and has entrusted various ministries for its management and mitigation. For instance, in case of tsunami or cyclone, the ministry of earth sciences would be responsible for disaster management and similarly for landslides, it will be the job of the ministry of mines. The health ministry will take care of biological disasters and the urban development ministry will deal with urban floods.

More than any other measures, it is resilience-sensitivity that is needed to be inculcated in employees to ensure that infrastructure services continue after disasters. One part is to have proper maintenance of the assets, so that they can withstand disruptions. For instance, if sewage systems are badly maintained, they, in turn, can trigger urban floods whenever there is heavy rain. The other, bigger part is to invest in training operational teams to handle disasters and work quickly to restore services. Recently The Economist reported on the different types of spending that Haiti, often hit by disasters, could do to prepare. The most valuable was to spend US$2 million to train "first responders".

For India, much of the infrastructure will still be built across the next 30 to 40 years. The aim should be to build it right the first time. Better regulation and better enforcement of that regulation will be critical. Japan has taught the world that planning for one disaster is not enough; one must forecast the worst scenario (tsunami plus earthquake plus nuclear meltdown).

Like the Rapid Action Force that is deployed to handle civil unrest and related emergencies, disaster management also requires the immediate availability of deployable funds with minimum bureaucratic delays. For instance, New York’s Metropolitan Transport Authority in 2013 issued Catastrophe Bonds tied only to storm surges.

A quick review of the finances of NDMA reveals that in 2015-16, it had a budgetary allocation of Rs 445 crore and it ended up spending Rs 651 crore. In 2016-17, the allocation was Rs 678 crore. Clearly, this is not adequate for the scale of the activities envisaged for NDMA and the ambitions of the National Disaster Management Plan. The envisaged span and scope of activities relating to policy and planning, mitigation, operations and communications, administration and capacity building call for far higher availability of funds.

One suggestion is to set up a Disaster Rapid Action Mitigation Fund (DRAM) with ex-ante sanctions in place for immediate release of funds by the designated authority.

India is geared to invest Rs 15 lakh crore per annum in the foreseeable future on infra creation. Both public and private developers can be mandated to contribute 0.25 per cent of the project cost to DRAM in national interest. A Rs 10,000-crore project then needs to contribute Rs 25 crore. Surely, it can absorb this amount in the capital structure, and its amortisation over the life of the asset. This one stipulation can start pouring in Rs 3,750 crore per annum into DRAM. Additional contributions from the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and budgetary allocations can further be used to enhance the corpus. India has a history of relevant cesses for larger national goals in the fuel cess for transportation development or the cess on coal for green purposes. The advantage of DRAM is that it will not be a recurring revenue expenditure, but a one-time initial charge on the capital cost of a project.
 

With a larger corpus under DRAM, and an engaged and energetic NDMA, India can hope to leapfrog to the front line of nations adequately and professionally prepared to handle disasters.

The author is chairman of Feedback Infra. vinayak.chatterjee@feedbackinfra.com; Twitter: @Infra_VinayakCh