2001-onwards – Disaster Risk Reduction

In 2001, GDS started working at a new location- the Dhani Block of District Maharajganj (Eastern UP). Located in the Rapti River Basin, the villages at this location are highly prone to floods. Based on the premise that during a natural calamity/disaster, the ‘suffers are the first responders’, GDS adopted the Community Based Disaster Risk Reduction (CBDRR) approach at this location. Thus began incorporation of the DRR approach into GDS’s programme strategies.

The CBDRR approach involves mobilization of communities into Village Disaster Management Committees (VDMCs), facilitating them in developing Village Disaster Management Plans (VDMPs), and implementing these plans by mobilizing resources from and the government line departments and their own resources. The VDMPs focus has been on making the dwellings flood-safe by raising the level of houses, hamlets and approach roads; organising safe modes of transportation during floods; organising safe sources of drinking water and maintaining sanitation and hygiene at the time of floods; and, building basic life saving, including first-aid ,skills in the communities. The most important component of GDS’s CBDRR approach however, and in a manner, GDS’s critical contribution to the approach has been application of strategies for making the livelihoods flood-safe. This proved to be the cornerstone for widespread adoption of GDS’s DRR interventions by the communities. The main emphasis of this strategy has been on mitigating the losses to agriculture and livestock-based livelihoods. GDS’s pioneering intervention of promoting “pre-flood paddy” cultivation to save the main monsoon agriculture season crop from floods became a major success and over a course of a few years, in the mid-2000s, spread into many flood prone regions in Eastern UP and North Bihar. The lessons emanating from this component proved valuable for GDS and helped it evolve the methodology for developing “context specific” solutions and packages of technologies and practices for agriculture development interventions.

In all, over the years, GDS’s DRR interventions have reached to over 300 villages and hamlets, covering over 22,000 households) in the mid-Rapti Basin, in Maharajganj, Siddarthnagar, Sant Kabir Nagar and Gorakhpur Districts; in the Baghmati River Basin in Sitamarhi District and in the Gandak Basin in West Champaran District of North-Western Bihar.

A unique achievement of GDS’s DRR initiatives has been the creation of a community based flood ‘Early Warning System’ (EWS), in the Gandak Basin, covering villages from West Champaran, Kushinagar and Maharajganj Districts. Located on the Nepal-India border and along the state borders of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, at the point where the Narayani/Gandak River enters in India from Nepal, the benefits of this intervention now extends to 25 villages (and 7500 households), all highly flood prone. The (flood) EWS promoted here is based on the use of telecommunication technology and on the ‘human capital’ and, is based on the flood warning information emanating from the Government of Nepal established flood measurement centre on River (called Narayani in Nepal), located at a place called Devghat- in the Himalayan foothills, about 80 km upstream from point where the river enters into India. The distinctive feature of this EWS intervention is that it is a TRANS-BOUNDARY initiative; that is, the communities from both the sides of Nepal – India border work in a concerted manner and in coordination with each other, to make the EWS functional.

The communities on the Nepal side receive the flood warning information from the Devghat centre (through text messages and, if there is need, through phone calls) on mobile phones and are then responsible for relaying this information to their counterparts in India, either through phone or (if the phone did not work) through sending a person across the border to the nearest Indian village (for this purpose, EW Task Forces have been promoted in all the project villages). Once the information reaches the Indian village located on the border, it is further relayed to other project villages- again, either through phone or through human agency. Through this ‘hub and spoke’ system the information is then further carried down to the farthest/ last village covered under the project (at about 70 km downstream from the border village). Over the last four years, this community-based initiative has been tested multiple times in real life flood situations and is being lauded as a unique initiative in the DRR communities in Nepal and India. In 2017 a transboundary Water Governance Project on the Mahakali – Sharda basin in Lakhimpur Kheri District was initiated with the support of Oxfam. The project covers 21 highly flood prone villages in 16 gram panchayats with around 7000 families at present. The initiative centers around policy advocacy with Government on community water rights, DRR and also sensitization of industry on community rights. In due course, transboundary dialogue with Nepal will be initiated to have a joint impact on the community and early warning systems.