Natural Disater in India

India is one of the countries which is the most exposed to the Natural disasters. All of them can occur in India: earthquakes, tsunami, Landslides, cyclone, flood. The manmade disaster also happened often: fire, chemical disaster like the sadly famous city of Bhopal. A chemical explosion happened in Bhopal in 1984 and killed more 7000 people. According to the UN, with Columbia, China and Bangladesh, India is a country which can suffers the most of the occurrence of a disaster.

The low level of the literacy of the population, only 63% of the population is able to read and write. In term of numbers, India is the country with the most illiterate people in the world. Add to this fact, the high density, and the weakness of the infrastructures and of the administration make the preparedness and the management about the disaster really complicated.

Childreach International India has decided to include disaster training to its program in order to increase the awareness of the children and the community.

By increasing the awareness about disaster within the communities, their vulnerability will automatically decrease. Last week we went to Hissar in Haryana, 3 hours from Delhi, where Childreach is running a project. This is a little city, surrounded by steel fabrics among others. There we had run disaster training both in English and Hindi. We explain them how a disaster can occurred and how to protect yourself in that case. To check their understanding of the training, we created “disaster teams”, where they had to draw either a disaster or how to protect from this disaster. The result was really amazing as you can see on the picture.

We can act on two axes to decrease the impact of the disaster: adaptation like build anti seismic building, or put dikes along the coast. The others axe of action is the preparedness and the awareness, Childreach choose to work on that point. So many people died because there are not aware of simple rescue gesture like in 2004 with the Tsunami. The water went far away from the beach, this is one of the announcement of the arrival of a tsunami, people aren’t aware and a lot of them stayed close to the ocean. Let’s hope that that kind of action can save some life.