As the title of Indian journalist P Sainath's book, Everybody Loves a Good Drought, suggests, disasters are lucrative for the relief bureaucracy and its retinue of supply contractors and distribution agencies. The financial scope that disasters offer for the diversion of public funds into private accounts through various administrative channels is the single biggest impediment to the adoption, in South Asia, of disaster prevention and vulnerability reduction perspectives. The stubbornness of the prevailing orthodoxy, which swears by the inevitability of disaster and hence emphasises the indispensability of relief, can in fact be attributed more to the profits of catastrophe than to ignorance of alternative views.
Among one of the purposes of Disaster Communicaton: A Resource Kit for Media, is to discuss in detail the available alternatives to this official vision of disaster management. Its first chapter is devoted to an extensive analysis of the differences between the prevailing approach and the alternative approach. The former is piecemeal and post-facto because it can, by definition, swing into action only after disaster has taken place on a scale sufficient to draw attention and funds to itself. By contrast the latter is a comprehensive strategy that looks to a community-based prevention and mitigation programme, in which development has a central role to play in reducing the vulnerability of marginal groups to adverse circumstances.
Through a series of empirical illustrations the chapter makes a convincing case for redefining disaster as the necessary prelude to dealing with it effectively. It demonstrates how resource differentials determine the extent to which families are affected by such events as cyclones and droughts. Barring those who are compelled by partisan financial considerations to believe otherwise, there is unlikely to be any objection from anyone else to the view that disaster is a function of underdevelopment, and that the magnitude of destruction and loss is a reflection of just how many people are unable to withstand the stress it unleashes.
After having made this point very successfully the book loses its way. The problem with the book begins a little before it reaches the second chapter. While "risk", "disaster", and "vulnerability" are defined to give it a functional relevance to the holistic, community-based approach, the authors omit to provide any definition of what a 'community' is, let alone one that is consistently unambiguous both practically and theoretically. The idea of 'community' is amoebic since the same group of people often constitute multiple communities with different and sometimes contradictory interests. Unless defined in a very precise way, the alternative approach can flounder in the very community through which it looks to salvage disaster management. For instance, the typical village 'community' is caste and class differentiated and lowest in the community are those most vulnerable. Taking this into account, does the alternative approach redefine community to mean only those most adversely affected? If so, how is it then to overcome the obstacles placed by the exploitative relationships in the existing 'village community'? If not, then how will it bring the oppressive institutions of the existing community to reorient itself into taking an interest in the welfare of the very people who they have themselves reduced to poverty.