India struggles with many
developmental problems, including illiteracy, high population growth,
and poor health. When a natural disaster strikes, women are especially
vulnerable because of traditional social, economic, and cultural
patterns that marginalize women and discriminate against them.
Emergencies create chaos and confusion for all, but in times of
disasters extra strains are imposed on women. It is important to study
the impact of disasters on women.
Sriganganagar District, the granary
of Rajasthan, is a very fertile area fed by three canal systems—Gang
Canal, Bhakhra Canal, and Indira Gandhi Canal. I am the first woman
District Collector and District Magistrate in the entire 55 years of
India’s independence. I was expected to pull my weight as equal to
many of my worthy [male] predecessors, but the challenges I faced were
far greater than those that plagued the Magistrates that preceded me.
I feel that women have to make an extra effort more often to make a
mark and to gain the same respect that seems to come automatically to
men. Free-flowing skepticism in official corners and from the public
can make one feel that “when you come in you start with the negative
balance against you and you have to prove otherwise.”
When I started my work in the district
I thought it was going to be a breeze, but it was a lot harder than I
expected. We dealt with many natural and man-made disasters—breaches in
canals, a fire in an ammunition depot, drought, floods, earthquake, a
war-like situation at the border, and the deterioration of public order
situations following the murder of labor leader Darshan Koda and the
death of a young boy while in police custody.
There are numerous memorable situations
of a “few seconds that shake men and the world” that leave a trail of
warnings that call for disaster preparedness in the future. In coping
with emergencies, many issues are raised. The experience of managing the
varied natural and man-made disasters in Sriganganagar District gave me
insight into male and female responses to disaster management. The
gender analysis of the study of disasters, and the strength and
vulnerability of women in disaster response raise a range of issues
facing women both as victims of disasters and as participants of
disaster management.
Disasters work like a magnifying glass
on society. They magnify what is good, but also what needs improvement.
Disasters do not affect everyone equally. Who you are and what you do
often determines your fate in such situations. A person’s problems
before the disaster are still there after the disaster, only worse. When
a disaster happens, both the strong and the weak points in a society
really stand out. This is true for gender issues as much as with any
other issue.
Most of us are familiar with the media
images of mothers with children standing amidst the wreckage of floods,
cyclones, earthquakes, and other major disasters. These pictures
reinforce a common stereotypic image of women and disasters; that women
are first and foremost victims. They are often the vulnerable poor,
marginalized and lacking influence. But this is only half of the
picture. Women also have an important positive role in communities. They
are the ones who feed and care for the family and members of society at
large. They contribute financially (whether formally or informally).
They are also an important force in community volunteer groups that are
often involved in disaster management.
Piperane village near Suratgarh, 85 km
from Sriganganagar on the Sriganganagar-Bikaner National Highway,
witnessed a fire in the army ammunition depot on May 25, 2001 that left
the community in a state of horror and shock. Ammunition remains were
scattered over an area of 20 sq km. Upon receipt of information from
army officials, relief and rescue operations became the top priority.
Detonations went off almost continuously. Instructions were issued to
cut off electricity, rail services, other transport services, and to
reduce the flow of water in canals. Finally, and most importantly,
orders were issued to evacuate the seven villages in close proximity to
the depot to prevent loss of human life.
We summoned the fire tenders from
Abohar, Ferozepur, and Mukhtsar in Punjab, and from the adjacent
districts of Hanumangarh and Bikaner to supplement the six tenders of
our district. The response time was incredible. After giving the
important instructions of the rescue operations, I accompanied the
Superintendent of Police to the depot. The long trail of 26 fire tenders
were lined up awaiting the signal from the army officials, who had
cordoned off the area. Piperane soon became densely populated by army
officials, civil administrators, the media, and onlookers. We set up a
temporary office and our telephone connection seemed to be the only link
with the outside world. The string of blasting sounds did not wane until
the late hours of the evening. It was not until the next morning that
the senior army officials escorted me into the depot. There were
remnants of ammunition everywhere and the brunt of the heavy impact was
borne by nearby buildings. An Electricity Department jeep lay singed,
high-tension wires were writhing, and burnt cattle and houses are hard
to describe in words.
While the fire burned, there was work
for men of all ages, but there was no place for a woman near the fires.
The younger boys were soon recruited for relief works while the women
prepared the food in three Dharamshalas of Suratgarh, which were
converted into temporary shelters for evacuees. The fire fighting was an
all-male affair: the emergency police service, fire brigade, and bomb
disposal squads consisted entirely of men. The work they did was very
public and recognized. In their emergency response behavior, men adopted
the “rescue the community” attitude while women were less involved.
Women provided food while men managed the provision of relief supplies.
These patterns existed because women have a relative lack of power and
control in society.
Sriganganagar shares 210 km of
international border with Pakistan. The long-brewing Indian-Pakistan
tension has sharpened and there was a deployment of army following a
major attack on Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. There has been
widespread use of landmines near border villages, creating hardship and
chaos for a large part of the local population. Many people who went to
their fields to water, tend, or harvest lost limbs in mine blasts.
Evacuation plans for people spread over
500 villages within 20 km of the border were well prepared, yet fear
prompted families to leave their women, children, and costly possessions
when they evacuated. There is unequal distribution of food in many
families and women often get fewer calories then men. Malnutrition and
poor health add to the physical weakness of women in general. The
literacy rate is lower for women and unemployment is twice that of men.
The rising unemployment among the rural population, the dwindling
livestock and feeds, and risk of exposure to mines prompted the district
administration to open “chara depots,” organize community “langars” at
pivotal points, and to provide some minimum relief to the blast victims.
A large number of employment works were also opened up under various
rural development schemes.
To truly understand how the households
responded to the war-like situation, we need to understand the pattern
of domestic labor and decision-making. As mothers, partners, daughters,
grandmothers, sisters, and aunts, women tend to do most of the household
and care-giving work. An unequal division of domestic responsibility
occurred after disasters, which often resulted in the absence of
husbands. Women headed their households in these absences, and they were
left to struggle alone, bearing the brunt of dual duties. The bottom
line is that while women play a crucial public and private role, their
voices have been unheard in organizational and community policy-making,
including disaster response and recovery.
I vividly remember the morning of
January 26, 2001. The clock was ticking towards 9 a.m. and I was
scheduled to take the salute for the Republic Day Celebrations. I was
conversing with my husband in Jaipur when we simultaneously experienced
tremors shaking the ground. Very soon we learned that these few seconds
had badly shaken most parts of Gujarat. A 7.7-magnitude earthquake had
just occurred. Later we would learn that the two-minute quake had killed
20,000 people and injured many thousands more. The earthquake caused
extensive damage to houses, buildings, roads, livestock, and natural
resources. The area of heaviest impact was the northwestern district of
Kutch and the towns of Bhuj, Anar, Bhachau, and Rajkot.
The cultural program was cancelled and
we turned our efforts to assessing the local and regional losses. Relief
work commenced immediately. The spontaneous out-pourings of money and
supplies from the people of Sriganganagar was impressive.
My husband left that evening to work as
a part of a U.N. Disaster Management Team, and continued in that
capacity for the next few months. He shared some of his observations
with me. After the earthquake, women in the disaster zone put all their
skill, and their will, into helping survivors and protecting their
families. He felt that women evacuees showed exceptional strength,
firmness, and grit. They survived by becoming active in their own
rehabilitation. They organized schooling for children and responded to
community needs as best they could, working whenever possible. Many
women said that working helped them to forget about loss of their
relatives and it kept them from falling into despair. Special search
teams of women and girls were at work to locate displaced people, and
their efforts resulted in reuniting lost children, old people, and many
of the ill and wounded with their relatives.
The rest of the country and the
international community also provided concern and contributions, but
some were inappropriate. There were complaints of poor quality of relief
grain, lack of drinking water and fresh vegetables, and the difficulties
and cost of cooking. The use of plastic buckets donated for relief,
rather than water pots, made water more liable to contamination.
Delivery of water by tankers was not well organized, leading to chaotic
distribution and spillage.
A major problem of Sriganganagar
District is the propensity for breaches in the canals. Heavy rains also
occasionally inundate low-lying areas and flooded villages. In 2001,
record water levels forced the evacuation of poverty-stricken people of
Alipura village—long after people with resources had left. Relief and
the rescue operations continued throughout the night, leaving many
victims and rescuers to spend the night in the open, next to meager
belongings on camel carts. When the families had to be shifted to the
nearest shelter with the sudden rise in the water level, the women,
children, and the elderly were the weakest and often had the greatest
trouble evacuating.
Gender directly affects vulnerability
and exposure to risk. Women and children are more exposed to risk
because their poverty and lack of mobility are factors. Housewives and
young mothers displaced by floods found it more difficult to find wage
labor and income-earning opportunities. This situation often threatened
the security of their relationship within the family. Also, young girls
who lost their savings and possessions during the floods basically lost
their dowries, which resulted in them losing the opportunity to get
married. This had serious implications for their social status,
psychological health, and sometimes their survival.
Hit badly by the loss of cotton crops
and scanty of rains in the last three years, 66 villages of Suratgarh
were declared drought-affected. A number of relief works, including road
projects, revival of traditional water sources, digging of ponds, and
desilting of canals were undertaken to generate employment. The sight of
a make-shift cradle fashioned from “odhna” (sari) open to comfort an
infant in the scorching heat was a common sight. Lack of rain meant
water sources were not recharged, and people had to wait long hours to
collect water. Women and children would often spend six to eight hours
daily to collect water.
The impact of drought is hardest on
women because of their socio-cultural and economic positioning within
the family and community. The workload on women increased due to the
shortage of water, ill health of animals, and sickness of members of
their families. When men lose their jobs, they often go to find work
elsewhere and leave their families behind. Women are also directly faced
with the consequences of land degradation. It is almost always on
exhausted land on which equally exhausted women toil. The migration of
men reduces their role in family duties and obligations. Consequently,
women’s work loads and responsibilities become greater, but they have
not enjoyed the corresponding increase in influence and opportunities to
assert themselves. Drought can have far-reaching impacts.
The study of many types of disasters
over a long period of time has shown that behavior of men and women is
quite often different. Also, in various stages of disastrous events,
women’s views and contributions are rarely given full recognition. For
example, in the post-impact period, most women are left to perform the
traditional and under-valued tasks, such as childcare, food preparation,
and domestic work, while men are more likely to leave the women to
participate in more visible and highly publicized relief efforts. Women
are seen as a vulnerable group, less unlikely to participate in
planning, in preparation, and unable to cope in the wake of disaster.
Gender relations determine people’s ability to anticipate, prepare,
survive, to cope with, and to recover from disaster. Gender inequality
embedded in the social and cultural fabric is the root cause of social
vulnerability. The traditional view of women as victims leaves men to
make decisions about their roles and needs and overlooks the vital work
and unique perspective that women can bring to disaster management.
The changing nature of family also
affects emergency response. The disappearance of joint and extended
families, urban migration, separation of working couples, and the
growing number of single parents raises new issues in disaster
management. What happens to children when a single parent is needed for
an emergency? What happens to children when both parents have emergency
responsibilities? What are the childcare arrangements during disasters?
Since most of initial search, rescue, and transport to medical
assistance is done by the survivors onsite, the migration of men to find
jobs may hinder initial response to local disasters. The longer life
spans of women also indicates that elderly women may outnumber men and
often live on their own. The aged may be reluctant to move out at
shorter notice and the prospect of approaching disaster can be very
daunting.
Targeted awareness and demystification
of stereotypes is required to remove the bias and allow the
consideration of the specific and differing capacities of women. The
strengths, knowledge, and skills possessed by men and women in
preparing, managing, and rebuilding are different, and thus useful in
different ways. Women should be seen as part of the solutions. A
paradigm shift is required to inculcate gender consciousness and also to
move from “relief” to “mitigation of disaster.” There is a need to
consciously enlist women in disaster preparedness and in coping with its
ensuing physical and mental stress. Enhanced leadership training can
improve women’s awareness of local hazards, and their involvement in
improving communication and delegating primary responsibilities in
management of emergencies. Generating new attitudes towards women’s
roles will improve the way we face emergencies, and allow us to deal
more productively with the physical and societal impacts of disasters.
Kiran
Soni Gupta is a senior civil servant presently working as Commissioner,
Command Area & Development at Bikaner in the Rajasthan State of India.
She is also Commissioner, Guides for Rajasthan State. After finishing
her education at Sacred Heart Convent School, she completed a Bachelor
of Arts with Honors in English from Government College of Women,Ludhiana.
She then obtained her Master’s and doctoral degrees in Sociology from
the Agricultural Universities of Punjab and Harayana, respectively.
Kiran Soni Gupta chose Civil Service as her career in 1985 and has
worked in Kerala for the government of India. Since 1994 she has
dedicated herself to the development of people of Rajasthan,
particularly women and children. She has also administered the
challenging border districts Sriganganagar and Rajasamand as District
Collector and Magistrate. Kiran Soni Gupta was instrumental in
establishing the State Women’s Commission of Rajasthan. She has worked
as Managing Director of Kerala State Women’s Development Corporation;
Director, Women and Children’s Department; Secretary, Rajasthan State
Women’s Commission; and currently nurtures the Scouts and Guides
movement.
Kiran Soni Gupta’s
accomplishments also include 23 research papers and 44 published
articles in leading papers like The Hindu and Indian Express.
She is also an artist and an ardent promoter of art and culture across
the world. She has held a number of national and international shows,
including recent shows in Tehran and Sri Lanka. Her artwork in various
techniques and mediums can be seen on www.kiransoniart.com and
www.worldartemporium.co.uk.
Kiran Soni Gupta is married
to a civil servant, Mr. Madhukar Gupta, Divisional Commissioner of
Bikaner. She has a ten-year-old daughter, Narayani, and a son, Vishnu,
aged seven years.