Revamping civil defence in India

Abstract

Civil defence is a large community based voluntary organization. Its basic objective is to build confidence, reduce fear and uncertainty, ensure higher survival rate, and assist raising people s quality of life during and after any kind of war or disasters. The Civil Defence concept s core aim has been to instill in people, the strength to survive the impacts of emergencies and mobilise in large numbers to assist the civil administration in ensuring faster recovery and early return to normalcy. It uses the principles of emergency operations: prevention, mitigation, preparation, response or emergency evacuation and recovery. Though civil defence in India took a formal shape through the enactment of the Civil Defence Act, 1968, its organization remained city/town centric till recently and was meant to assist the civil administration and military during any hostile attack. Even the spread of the organization was limited to a few cities/towns with only 225 cities/towns identified and the organization being active in only 121 cities/towns of those. Only recently it was realized that disasters result in large scale destruction of property, loss of human lives and disruption of normal life in the society, the community is always the first to respond to such disaster situations and hence it is very essential to keep the community adequately aware and prepared to respond to any such emergency/disaster to mitigate the damage and suffering. Thus, the scope of civil defence organization was expanded to include disaster management in 2009 through the Civil Defence (Amendment) Act, 2009.As per the recommendations of the High-Power Committee headed by Sri K M Singh, MHA seems to have agreed to the idea of making the CD a broad-based organization spreading across the districts and in 2014 a grant of Rs 290.89 Crores was allocated for setting up CD in 140 Most Vulnerable Districts and to strengthen CD in existing Multi-Hazard Prone Districts . These nomenclatures of most vulnerable districts and multi-hazard prone districts were used for the first time in the order of MHA regarding allocation of grants for Mainstreaming Civil Defence in Disaster Risk Reduction issued on 6th June 2014. Though this order mentioned about creating CD establishment in most vulnerable districts , it remained silent about the existing CD towns in such districts (eg. CD town Mallapura lies within the most vulnerable district Uttara Kannada). In the absence of any formal communique/order, presently there is confusion regarding the way it need to be organized in the existing city/town centric setups. There is no doubt that the CD organisation should be broad based covering the entire nation and this is possible only when it is district based. But, at present the organization structure is not uniform throughout the country with a few states having CD under Disaster Management (DM) Dept. (a branch of Revenue Dept.) whereas in most of the states it is under the Home Dept. To make the Civil Defnce organization a broad-based organization covering all the districts in the country has financial implications. So far very little has been done to make this an effective organization by utilizing the intrinsic volunteerism of the people. Also, the Civil Defence at the city/town level is set up under a controller appointed under sub-section (1) of section 4 of the Civil Defence Act, 1968. The power to appoint controllers lie with State Governments and the controller shall not be below the rank of a District Magistrate. Hence most of the Civil Defence Corps are controlled by District Magistrates. With huge work load on the DMs, they are not able to devote required time for organizing Civil Defence in their respective districts. As the role of controller is very important in organizing, obtaining finances, maintaining the morale of the volunteers and to deploy them during emergencies, it is essential to consider alternative approaches for organizing CD at district level. Four different approaches have been discussed in the paper and it is recommended to put in place a combination of utilizing the NGOs to enroll, train and keep motivated the volunteers under the supervision of SP at the district level to achieve the stated objectives.