Women and Disasters in South Asia

Survival, security and development

Linda Racioppi, Swarna Rajagopalan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138210462
• eBook ISBN: 9781317307594
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

South Asia is one of the most vulnerable areas of an increasingly disaster-impacted world, with cyclones, earthquakes, floods and droughts causing several casualties and disrupting lives and livelihoods every year. Yet the impacts of disasters are not equally distributed across the peoples of the region.Women and men experience disaster differently, and their needs in the aftermath of disaster often differ.

Bringing together perspectives from academics, emergency response specialists and development practitioners, the volume investigates to what extent and in what ways gender affects the course of post-disaster reconstruction. Conversely, it also explores in what ways gender politics may be altered by disaster and post-disaster reconstruction.

The study includes:

• a comprehensive overview of key issues facing women and men, as gendered beings, in reconstruction and development;
• a targeted observation of specific South Asian disaster contexts; and
• a sustained discussion of case studies and their implications and lessons.

This book will interest scholars and researchers of disaster management, rehabilitation studies, gender, environment, ecology and sociology. It will also be useful to institutions dealing with natural and man-made disasters, non-governmental organisations and disaster recovery professionals.

1 Introduction

Linda Racioppi

DOI: 10.4324/9781315650630-1

South Asia is one of the most disaster-prone areas of an increasingly disaster-impacted world, with floods, droughts, cyclones, storms, tsunamis, earthquakes, extreme temperatures and epidemics occurring with deadly results in recent decades. According to data provided by Preventionweb, an information project portal of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR), between 1980 and 2010, 470,124 people died in disasters that affected some 1,925,981,600 people in the region. The vulnerability continued in recent years. Despite predictions that the South Asian monsoon season of 2013 would be ‘average’, the rains once again brought widespread casualties and destruction of property in their wake. With the death toll in Uttarakhand, India, alone climbing to 600 and more than 150,000 people being evacuated,¹ this ‘average monsoon’ was proving to be unusually harmful and destructive. Unfortunately, 2014 witnessed further devastation as flooding in Jammu and Kashmir killed 284 persons in India and additional deaths in Pakistan (J&K Floods).

These recent disasters recall the catastrophe nearly a decade earlier of the Indian Ocean tsunami. On Sunday, 26 December 2004, the tsunami triggered by the massive earthquake in Indonesia smashed into the coastline of Tamil Nadu’s Nagapattinam district. The tsunami’s sudden onset left over 8,000 people dead, with thousands more missing. In Nagapattinam district alone, 6,065 died – 2,406 adult females and 1,883 adult males (Tsunami Relief and Rehabilitation). In some districts, 75 per cent or more of the dead were female. In addition, the tsunami damaged or demolished tens of thousands of homes, schools and businesses, devastating communities, making Nagapattinam India’s worst-hit district. Indian authorities responded rapidly in the aftermath. Their hard work was praised for its timeliness and efficiency. Yet efforts to deal with the devastation were often inadequate to address women’s special needs: well-meaning relief agencies scrambled to provide aid to pregnant women, security for women bathing and gathering water, appropriate clothing and hygienic supplies (e.g. sanitary napkins), adequate cooking facilities and psychological support. And men, who had relied on ‘Mother Sea’ for their livelihoods, were left unemployed, homeless and bereft of their wives and children. Nonetheless, some communities, and the leaders and organisations working with them, encouraged local women and men not only to voice their concerns about relief efforts but also to participate in framing long-range reconstruction and development plans as well as disaster preparedness. As reports of disaster-affected areas throughout South Asia and globally indicate, the situation of Nagapattinam is not unique. In South Asia, as in many other parts of the world, the devastation wreaked has not been equally distributed across the population. Women, the elderly and the poor are often disproportionately disadvantaged during a disaster, echoing the findings of Neumayer and Plümper:

Natural disasters do not affect people equally as if by an arbitrary stroke of nature. Instead, the disaster impact is contingent on the vulnerability of affected people, which can and often does systematically differ across economic class, ethnicity, gender, and other factors.

(2007: 561)

A growing literature on gender and disaster demonstrates that women and men experience disaster differently and that their needs in the aftermath of disaster often differ.

Indeed, three propositions have now become axiomatic in the world of gendered disaster studies. The first is that gender plays out in disasters in ways that require its attention in relief and recovery efforts. Ignoring gender condemns communities to continuing vulnerability to natural and man-made hazards and reduces the likelihood that long-term resilience can be achieved. The second axiom is that women are particularly vulnerable in the post-disaster period. Rape and other forms of gender-based violence are not uncommon, and their personal security (as well as that of family members they care for) is often precarious in the face of food and water, housing and medical shortages. Third, disaster-risk reduction, disaster management and disaster recovery can reinforce or undermine longer-range development programmes and strategies as well as women’s empowerment. Failure to link development programmes to disaster resilience can put communities, and particularly women and other vulnerable groups in those communities, doubly at risk. Despite this recognition that disasters, security, development and gender influence each other, the literature claims that reconstruction is hardly ever gender neutral and that considerable work remains to be done in both conceptualising and enacting gender-sensitive post-disaster reconstruction and development (Ariyabandu and Wickramasinghe 2003, Enarson and Chakrabarti 2010, Enarson and Morrow 1998, Fernando and Fernando 1997, Rajagopalan and Parthib 2006).

The failure of disaster response, recovery and redevelopment to reliably attend to gender differences/women’s needs and to the gender politics that undergird social relations raises important questions for anyone interested in disaster relief, disaster recovery and disaster preparedness and mitigation. At the same time, studying the gender context for disaster provides scholars of gender the unique opportunity to investigate the myriad ways that gender infuses crises and crises shape gender relations. To what extent and in what ways do pre-disaster gender relations affect the course of post-disaster relief and reconstruction? To what extent and in what ways might gender relations be altered by disaster and post-disaster reconstruction? Put more positively, how can women (and other disadvantaged groups) take advantage of the post-crisis environment to press for a changed understanding of security, for enhanced rights, for public voice and political participation and for inclusive development? What lessons can be drawn from research findings and on-the-ground practice that will illuminate our understanding of disaster as gendered and provide guideposts for future responses? In this volume, activists, fieldworkers and academics come together to address aspects of these questions.

A cursory glance at the gendered landscape of disasters in South Asia illustrates the importance of these questions. According to the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Disaster Net, South Asia is the most disaster-prone area in the world, with well over 1,300 discrete disaster events between 1970 and 2009. During that same time frame, more than 2,400,000 people in the region were affected by disasters (including natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods and drought as well as man-made disasters such as chemical spills), with nearly 1 million killed (SAARC ‘Trends’).

In the more recent term, South Asia continues to be plagued by multiple kinds of disasters, with varying levels of casualties and destruction.

Figure 1.1 Deaths due to natural disasters in South Asia

Source: Data from Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters

Figure 1.2 Homeless persons due to natural disasters in South Asia

Source: Data from Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters

Figure 1.3 Injured persons due to natural disasters in South Asia

Source: Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters. EM-DAT: The OFDA/CRED International Disaster Database. Online. 13 September 2012. http://www.emdat.be

While these data demonstrate clearly the region’s disaster vulnerability, they do not convey that many of the most vulnerable communities are also some of the least developed, least served by governments and development agencies and most afflicted by economic (and gender) inequality.² Not surprisingly, sexual norms and gender inequalities can often result in highly gendered effects from disasters as well as highly gendered responses to emergencies. For example, as noted earlier, women outnumbered men among those killed during the 2004 tsunami in Tamil Nadu due to pre-existing social and cultural practices, and first-responders initially failed to consider the special needs of women who might have been pregnant, lactating or menstruating at the time of the catastrophe. On the other hand, South Asia also contains important examples of active women’s movements and grass roots mobilisations, innovative development programmes and evidence of community adaptation and resilience to disasters, as well as of innovative gender-sensitive post-disaster-risk reduction and management programmes. As such, it provides a rich terrain for examining the interplay of disaster, security, development and gender.

This chapter has several purposes. One is to introduce readers to what Enarson and Morrow (1998) call ‘the gendered terrain of disaster’ and post-disaster reconstruction in the context of South Asia. Another is to interrogate some of the conceptual conundrums embedded in the growing literature on disasters and gender. Starting with the idea that conceptual imprecision and ambiguity shape our ability to grasp gender politics ‘on the ground’, the chapter suggests the need to ‘read across’ genres and literatures (e.g. academic studies, NGO reports, activist and practitioner accounts) in order to comprehend the range of ways in which recovery from disaster is gendered and to formulate better responses to disasters. A third purpose is to shed light on women’s experiences of disaster and recovery by drawing on human security and sustainable development paradigms. These observations link to the chapter’s final purpose, which is to introduce the chapters in the volume.

Conceptualising disaster studies

One of the challenges in thinking about or working in the field of post-disaster studies is the lack of clarity about the object of study. This observation may seem counter-intuitive: what could be clearer than disaster? As depicted in the media, they are big, dramatic, community-shattering, heartbreaking events. Oxfam and the Red Cross spring into action; governments and their allies rush crores of rupees and dollars onto the scene; schoolchildren around the world raid their piggy banks and purses to contribute to relief and rehabilitation efforts. But why is it that some disasters get our attention while others do not? Partly it is a matter of size (massive death tolls and property destruction attract more attention than disasters that cause fewer fatalities or are more localised), but partly it is about how we construct what qualifies as a disaster. When conceptual frameworks operate in ways that obscure meaning, they can privilege some events and actions while dismissing others and thereby mask social and political inequalities.

One much-quoted definition from the World Health Organisation, an organisation serving many of the first-responders at disasters, asserts that a disaster is ‘a sudden ecological phenomenon of sufficient magnitude to require external assistance’ (Guerdan 2009: 32, Zibulewsky 2001: 144). It is interesting to note that this definition points out that a disaster is an ‘ecological phenomenon’, that is ‘natural’. Many scholars, however, contest the continued circulation of the idea of disasters as ‘natural’ catastrophes. As Terry Cannon writes in his 1994 article, ‘ Hazards [sic] are natural, but… disasters are not, and should not be seen as the inevitable outcome of a hazard’s impact’ (13). Thus, an alternative approach, promoted by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED),³ drops the notion that ‘nature’ is responsible for disasters and instead focuses on impacts: ‘a situation or event which overwhelms local capacity, necessitating a request to a national or international level for external assistance.’ If the local community cannot manage a response, if the event surpasses their capabilities, then a disaster has occurred. Boin, Comfort and Demchak offer a more fulsome definition of disasters as ‘low chance, high impact events… [that present] urgent threats to societal core values and life-sustaining systems that typically require governmental intervention under conditions of deep uncertainty’ (Boin, Comfort and Demchak 2010: 2). Nonetheless, as this volume suggests, the legacy of associating ‘disaster’ with ‘nature’ continues to influence analysis and practice.

Events such as the 2004 tsunami or cyclones such as the 1999 calamity that hit the coast of Orissa or the 2001 earthquake in the Kutch district of Gujarat clearly fall within the parameters of these definitions. They provoke politicians, emergency response specialists and development officers to (quite rightly) respond quickly.⁴ But what about annual flooding in Bihar or mudslides in Nepal that take lives and devastate regions every year? Are these disasters? What about industrial pollution and rising sea levels due to climate change – ‘slow disasters’ – in the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu, where years of environmental degradation lead to salinisation of ground water, arsenic-laced water supplies, and so on, which either are or will soon become as dangerous as tornadoes or floods and as difficult for communities to deal with (Janakarajan 2007)? Sunil Bastian says that disasters continue to be treated as ‘isolated “events” rather than a process characterised by the interrelationship between a natural phenomenon and society’ (2009: 222).

Within these definitions are embedded many assumptions and other obliquely defined concepts – what is the local community that should be able to manage the event? Is it a particular communal group? The broader society of a village or town? The district? The state? And what does it mean to be overwhelmed? How should the community respond? Or put another way, when is a ‘disaster’ declared such that a community is entitled to external support? And then what is meant by ‘external’? The town next door? The state? The national government? The international community? In a sense, exteriority has become a chief determinant of how we think about disaster and, of course, presumes some major response at least by the central government if not by the international community. How are such external actors to operate? What o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of boxes
• About the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction—LINDA RACIOPPI
• 2 Gender differential impacts of the 2004 tsunami—CHAMAN PINCHA
• 3 The interplay of women, work and disasters: missing women’s views—MIHIR BHATT
• 4 Livelihoods re-examined: the distribution of fisheries-sector aid and its impact on women’s livelihoods in post-tsunami, Tamil Nadu, India—JULIA NOVAK COLWELL
• 5 Experiences of women with super cyclone in coastal Odisha—MAMATA SWAIN, MRUTUNJAY SWAIN AND RANJU H. SAHOO
• 6 Gender play in economic redevelopment in post-tsunami Sri Lanka—MADHAVI MALALGODA ARIYABANDU, RAMONA MIRANDA AND KUSALA WETTASINGHE
• 7 Adaptability to floods in North Bihar: gendered experiences—EKLAVYA PRASAD WITH VINAY KUMAR, PRADEEP PODDAR AND PREM VERMA
• 8 Gender politics and disaster in rural Nepal—SABRINA REGMI
• 9 Pakistan floods: reports from the field—SANA SALEEM
• 10 Rural women as architects of recovery and reconstruction: the Swayam Shikshan Prayog story—PREMA GOPALAN
• 11 Gender-based violence and disasters: South Asia in comparative perspective—BRENDA PHILLIPS AND PAMELA JENKINS
• 12 Gender, disasters and development: opportunities for South–South cooperation—MIHIR BHATT AND MEHUL PANDYA WITH ZENAIDA DELICA-WILLISON
• 13 Exploring the meaning of securitisation for ‘gender and disaster’—NIBEDITA S. RAY-BENNETT
• 14 Intersections and beyond—SWARNA RAJAGOPALAN
• Index