Disaster Management in Fisheries

5.1.9.2 The non-structural measures include

• Flood-plain management such as Flood Plain Zoning and Flood Proofing, including disaster preparedness
• Maintaining wetlands
• Flood forecasting and warning services

There is plenty of native intelligence among the people that is very useful in averting and responding to disasters. Planning for disaster management must see this as an asset. The top-down planning and implementation currently in vogue is a poor substitute for community participation. Hence the Community Based Disaster Preparedness (CBDP) is highly encouraged and given much importance in the project.

Why should people be brought in for a community approach to disaster management? The answer should be easy to appreciate. If tribes in the Andaman could survive the tsunami, it was because their existing warning systems worked well in comparison to our non-existent modern systems. The fact that traditional houses of wood and stone survived the Uttarkashi earthquake not so long ago while modern buildings collapsed offered a similar lesson. In the flood-prone rural North-East, you can find houses on bamboo stilts that allow flood waters to flow under them rather than through or over! One need not multiply examples to just make a small point: Native intelligence is significant and technical expertise needs to treat this as complementary. This intelligence needs to be tapped for devising approaches to management of disasters. Further, policies and laws for disaster management need to provide space for such intelligence to be counted.