The rural development ministry has hinted at reforms in the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS) which will exapnd the ambit of work under the scheme to disaster management projects.

“Adoption to climate change and resilience to natural disasters is one of the priority items for reforms as per the MNREGA is concerned,” union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday at the launch of the World Bank’s report on ‘Natural Hazards, Unnatural disasters: the Economics of Effective Prevention’ in New Delhi.

The minister said that he will be intiating talks with the members of the national disaster management authority (NDMA) and other  experts in the next few days. The consultation will help shape a blueprint for the necessary reforms, he noted.

“We can make a beginning in some of the coastal and hilly areas in the country, which are visited by natural disasters frequently,” the minister added.

The proposed reform has the potential to benefit over 30 crore people who live in peninsular India which is vulnerable to natural disasters.“The way we manage coastal India is very important,” Ramesh said. In India, 78 percent of all cities having a population greater than 10 lakh fall in seismic zones III, IV  and V. Seven out of 31 such cities are in seismic zone IV. Most of the areas of the Himalayan region come under Seismic zone V making them extremely vulnerable to quakes.

The World Bank report says, “India’s growing cities will expose more people and property to hazards, with an estimated 200 million city dwellers likely to be exposed to storms and earthquakes by 2050 almost three times more than the estimated 70 million today.”

“Protecting poor people from vulnerabilities are very important otherwise economic growth will be slowed down,” said disaster management expert Mihir Bhatt. The report said that nearly 500 million citizens across rural and urban India have been affected by floods alone during the last three decades. “Annual losses from natural hazards have more than tripled over the last three decades, with cumulative losses over this period estimated at over $48 billion,” according to the home ministry figures.

Prevention measures can lower vulnerability to natural hazards such as earthquakes, storms, floods and droughts, said the report.“There have been 3.3 million deaths from natural hazards since 1970, or about 82,500 a year…,” the 254-page report added.

“Only 20 percent projects are disaster risks projects in India. We do have long way to go,” said M. Shashidhar Reddy, vice chairman of NDMA.
The report warned, “By 2100, even without climate change, damages from weather-related hazards may triple to $1 billion annually and factoring in climate change could push costs even higher.”

“A central message of the report is that “prevention pays, but you don’t always have to pay more for prevention,” said Mahmoud Mohieldin, World Bank managing director.

In India, the Bank is funding three disaster risk management projects - the National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project (NCRMP), the Emergency Tsunami Reconstruction Project (ETRP) and the Bihar Kosi Flood Recovery Project (BKFRP).