Contingency planning: Reality doesn’t always go with ‘fancy’ plans

Officials and experts meet to discuss the lessons learnt over two years.

KARACHI: After two successive years of flooding in Sindh, the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Provincial Disaster Management Authority (PDMA), experts and district level government officials got together at a conference to pass resolutions for disaster contingency planning.

The event was organised by the Participatory Development Initiatives and Oxfam to discuss how to conduct contingency planning.

“The PDMA is a paper tiger that doesn’t have the teeth to bite. They drew up some great terms of reference in 2007 which covered all aspects, but lacked the required funding,” said Idris Rajput, the former secretary irrigation Sindh. “I can say that the [2011 flood response] was because of bad governance.”

Deputy Commissioner Shaheed Benazirabad district Imtiaz Ali Mangi dismissed many claims with a sarcastic remark. “It is all the government’s fault; we are responsible for the mess.” Changing tack, he said, “It is very easy to sit in Karachi or Islamabad and draw up fancy contingency plans in English but the ground realities are different.”

Rajput held the district administration(s) responsible for not exercising authority to drain floodwater. He pointed out that drainage systems had not been maintained while others were still being designed. Rajput said natural drainage routes were not utilised, influential people had interfered in draining water and that there was a dearth of places to temporarily resettle people.

Mangi, for his part, said that people don’t visit PDMA’s website and study its contingency plans. Early warning systems, he said, don’t easily translate from paper into a rural setting.

Kamran Sharif from United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs (UNOCHA) took a more balanced approach. “A lot of great work has been done by the NDMA and PDMA over the past years,” he said. “They have been making contingency plans, but the issue I see is that they are very reactive and do not deal with multiple hazards.”

Aurat Foundation director Mahnaz Rahman focused on gender issues, which are often overlooked in disaster management. Rahman argued that when the social landscape is disrupted by a disaster, women become vulnerable to sexual assault, kidnapping, trafficking and forced marriages and have restricted access to healthcare.

Despite the disagreements, attendees did pass resolutions on reviewing and updating contingency plans on every level and on decentralising disaster management.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 30^th, 2011.