Migration: Prevention Is Always Better than Cure

It is International Migrants day and since morning, a series of faces have been passing before my eyes. These are faces of women whom I have met in recent times and found, they were all victims of climate change. It affected each of them in a different way, but at the end of the day, uprooted them from their homes and turned them into migrants with an uncertain future.

Let me share the stories of five of them.

Akshaya, Hyderabad - Migrant, because there was no WATER.

Akshaya Gaud is 24 and a commercial sex worker. She migrated from Adilabad - a district  in Andhra Pradesh state of southern India that has been severely affected by consecutive droughts. Akshaya migrated 2 years ago to Hyderabad because there was no water. All the ponds dried and ground water level depleted so much, borewells could not produce any water. When I interviewed her for my story 'Drought drives rural Indian women into city sex trade' , she said this: “The last time I visited my home, there was hardly enough water to drink. When I returned, I brought back a bundle of unwashed clothes with me because there was no water to wash them. How can we live like this?” 

Our Disasters, Their Disasters

This Sunday I heard Sasidhar Reddy, Vice-Chairman of  our National Disaster Management Authority(NDMA) asking each state to create its own 'Disaster Response Force', just like the center's National Disaster Response Force (NDRF). In fact, Reddy said that the response force should be capable enough to manage not just natural calamities, but also the consequences of a chemical and biological attack.

Sikkim earthquake in September 2011

A year ago, when tsunami hit Japan, I remember watching on TV the visuals of rising wall of sea water, floating cars,  submerging building blocks etc and getting awestruck by the way people over there kept their cool, without any visible sign of panic anywhere. I remember sharing this thought on Facebook and learning that almost everyone of my friends also wondered about it.

We knew the answer of course: the Japanese didn't panic, because they had a disaster management system that they could totally rely on.

In contrast, we have disasters by the dozen (flood, cyclones, earthquake, wildfire) each year, but our way to fight them basically means neighbors helping each other out and when things are way too horrific, the local govt. appeals to the army to help, which normally is done after quite a few days. Since the Fukushima disaster, I have often wished, 'if only we could have such a system!' 

This is why I found Reddy's statement quite interesting. Of course, it  was also too ambitious (chemical and biological disaster preparedness, when we don't even have readiness to take care of a flash flood???), nevertheless worthy to be taken seriously simply because to ignore it would mean being stupid.