The following jacket advertisement (which is expensive) appeared in The Hindu (and perhaps other newspapers as well; I didn’t check) yesterday:
Something seemed off about the messaging here when I looked at it yesterday morning, and it clicked into place today: the poster’s claims focus on relief rather than on reducing flood risk. It framed success as “highest compensation” and disbursal “in record time”, shifting the evaluation of performance to administrative throughput after losses occur and away from measures that should have avoided those losses.
Such superlatives are not comparable across states because categories, eligibility rules, and the methods of evaluation vary, which means a high rupee-figure denotes fiscal capacity more than efficacy. The emphasis on livestock compensation also raises concerns about incidence: payments of Rs 37,500 for a milch animal but Rs 100 per poultry bird allocate more relief to owners of higher value assets, while landless labourers, tenant farmers, and sharecroppers may be undercovered by title-based schemes. And declaring 30 days as a benchmark for speed is incomplete if the state doesn’t also disclose the rate of coverage, rate of error, quality of verification, and the share of households that actually received matching payments.
One line in the poster is particularly curious: about granting farmers the right to extract flood-deposited sand from their fields, because that seems to normalise a symptom of flooding rather than address the upstream events that moved that sand, including silted drains, encroached floodplains, and coordination failures around releasing river waters. It can also invite ad hoc mining that render significant ecological costs. In a basin where shifting rainfall and sediment dynamics routine increase risk exposure, these omissions matter. High exposure strengthens the case to prevent these disasters by regularly desilting water channels, maintaining drains, zoning floodplains, auditing embankments, instituting timely and useful early warnings, and planning evacuations. We deserve better than celebrations of post-event transfers.
In fact, the crop-loss figure of Rs 20,000 per acre is unlikely to cover the total input costs, soil remediation, and lost wage incomes and doesn’t reflect indirect losses. Similarly, paying for animal deaths says little about the presence of raised shelters, fodder banks, vaccinations or evacuation plans to reduce mortality. A more appropriate frame of accountability would be to publish premonsoon preparation plans, independent audits of beneficiary coverage and misses, inclusion of tenants and labourers, and year-on-year reductions in the number of flooded settlements, and livestock mortality. Structural steps such as enforcing floodplain maps, removing encroachments, improving storm water systems, investing in wetlands and diversion capacity, diversifying crops, and expanding micro-insurance would indicate a shift from recurring loss and relief to risk management.
The advertisement, however, signals a state administration’s willingness to accept that floods will cause larger and larger losses and that the state expects to be judged on the speed and size of compensation rather than on the damage it has managed to avoid.