Standing tall
For over 20 years, an NGO has been helping residents of disaster-prone areas by building sturdy houses and ensuring greater preparedness, writes Geetanjali Krishna
Amid all the images of devastation from a flooded Kerala, another set of images has gone somewhat unnoticed this monsoon. This year, as the swelling Brahmaputra swept away houses in Assam, surprisingly, some in Nikori village of Golaghat district have remained standing — tall and dry. Like traditional Assamese houses, these new houses are also on stilts. But the stilts are higher, built with stronger species of bamboo and on concrete foundations, making them much more resilient. The good folk at Delhi-based Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society (Seeds) are satisfied with their design and have already built over 80 houses funded by Godrej and Give2Asia. “Earlier, traditional architecture techniques used to be best suited to local ecology,” says Seeds cofounder Manu Gupta. “But the present spate of floods in regions not historically prone to them — Ladakh, Srinagar and now Kerala — have necessitated some tweaks to enable local houses to better withstand them.”
Born in 1994, Seeds is a group of professionals that has been working in disaster-prone areas across seven states in India and Nepal to improve the lives of people exposed to disasters. Over the years, they have observed that more people lose lives because of the collapse of houses, flouting of land use permits, lack of early-warning systems and poor disaster preparedness, than due to the disaster itself. Consequently, they’ve focused on building better houses and improving the natural water-soaking capacity of the neighbouring areas. Moreover, all their designs are opensource, inexpensive and usually carried out by the beneficiaries themselves. This has also proved to be a valuable psychological tool to combat the trauma of the disaster. In Bihar, for example, Seeds has worked with villages along the the Kosi river in Saharsa district to plant buffer plantations that would act as natural sponges, set up a rudimentary early warning system and built a drinking water filtration plant. “All these efforts have been to mitigate the effects of the next flood,” says Gupta.
Additionally, Seeds has also undertaken postdisaster rescue and rehabilitation in several recent disasters such as the 2005 Indian Ocean tsunami, flash floods in Leh in 2010, floods in Srinagar in 2014 and presently, of course, the floods in Kerala. “We are collecting kits for home and school for the worst affected, and our team of construction experts is on the spot to assess the situation,” says Gupta. “The resident commissioner of Kerala has told us that there are a million people in camps at the moment and as they start returning to their homes, we’ll help rebuild them.”
However, even as Gupta and his cohorts address the immediate needs of the victims of Kerala’s floods, they plan to increase their advocacy for the need to invest in the prevention of disasters rather than simply reacting to them. Seeds is working with 50 government schools in Delhi on a threeyear programme sponsored by Honeywell on disaster management. “Along with educating students about how to stay safe, the idea is also to create safe school infrastructure about which, although there are many guidelines on paper, there isn’t much awareness,” he says. They also plan to work on a zone of protection along the fragile Himalayan belt, where they’d engage with local communities and state governments to find ways to coexist with minimal impact on the ecology, and create safe, disaster-resistant infrastructure.
These preventive measures are imperative, as Gupta and the folks at Seeds are convinced that the Kerala disaster is going to be reprised, year after year, and in different parts of the country. A January 2018 report by Seeds and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) based on floods in the subcontinent between 2000 and 2017 shows that over 2,200 Indian cities/towns (including 56 per cent of the country’s planned smart cities) have witnessed at least 11 floods in this period. “Climate change, changing land use patterns and deforestation across the country are going to make floods across India a regular feature of the Indian monsoon,” says Gupta. “All we can do is brace for impact and take steps to somehow mitigate the damage.”
Learn more about Seeds and contribute for the Kerala flood victims on their website, www.seedsindia.org Twitter: @SeedsIndia or log on to their Facebook page