Abstract
Floods continue to adversely affect the life and livelihoods of the riverine population. This happens despite the public investment that has taken place on flood protection in the last six decades. The discourse around flood protection now needs to be shifted to flood governance through resilience building among the flood-prone riverine population. Resilience building could take place through multiple sets of interventions that would aim at reducing vulnerability, enhancing access to various developmental services and maximizing productivity. An action needs to be undertaken on a mission mode, and a special multisectoral programme, something akin to a Flood-Prone Area Initiative programme, is the need of the hour.
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- 1.
Ideally one expects a negative relationship between expenditure on flood protection and damage from floods, as the flood protection mechanism is expected to reduce the flood damage. However, in India the correlation between the two is strongly positive (r = .56).
- 2.
The civil society organizations, Centre for Microfinance and Livelihoods in Guwahati and Deshbandhu Club in Cachar, have been actively working in Dhemaji and Cachar, respectively. They helped the author to identify the village cluster.
- 3.
However the data from Census 2011 should be taken more as an indicative measure as we found anomalies between the Census data and our ground-truthing done in the village site.
- 4.
Based on Bhalerao et al. (2015) and the production data shared by the district fisheries officer in Cachar.
- 5.
Based on the interview in the district fisheries office in Cachar.
- 6.
Based on the interview and document shared by the district fisheries office in Cachar.
- 7.
The fieldwork was conducted in 2016–2017.
- 8.
The fieldwork was conducted in 2016 and 2017.
- 9.
In another study spanning over more than 100 flood-prone villages in UP, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam, it was found that conventional drinking water and sanitation facilities, even if constructed, did not take the flood/waterlogging into consideration, and hence they were prone to inundation during floods. The adverse effect of this mostly fell on the women (Phansalkar et al. 2016).
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Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges the generous support of the Tata Trusts for supporting the field research for this study. The author would also like to thank the Centre for Microfinance and Livelihoods, Guwahati, Assam, and Deshbandhu Club, Cachar, Assam, for facilitating the field research.
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Choudhury, N. (2019). Resilience Building in Flood-Prone Areas: From Flood Protection to Flood Management. In: Singh, A., Saha, D., Tyagi, A. (eds) Water Governance: Challenges and Prospects. Springer Water. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2700-1_13
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