Monsoon rains come every year, but the flooding caused by this year’s downpour has been some of the worst in decades for India, Bangladesh and Nepal.
19 million people have been displaced by the deluge. That’s roughly the entire population of New York State, the 3rd largest state in the union, or around the entire population of Sri Lanka.
Put another way, these monsoon floods have already produced nineteen times as many refugees as Katrina did. Katrina scattered up to one million Americans, and that was the largest American population displacement in 150 years.
The biggest danger from the rain isn’t drowning, it’s the disease that it brings once water supplies get contaminated:
“Entire villages are days away from a health crisis if people are not reached in the coming days,” … UNICEF’s health chief in India, said in a statement.
The threat of waterborne disease is high because wells have been contaminated by floodwaters … In Bangladesh, there were 1,400 reported cases of diarrhea in the past 24 hours… [Link]
The danger is worse because floodwaters have closed the roads to many villages, so aid workers can’t easily distribute food and clean water. The Indian air force has air dropped food for 2 million people in Bihar. This is going to be a serious task, one that will require both government and civil society working together, something they are lousy at doing.
A lack of coordination between relief organizations can have serious effects. During the 2005 Pakistan earthquake all the groups involved worked without even a map to determine who was most important to reach, who had been reached, and who still needed help. Not only were they uncoordinated, but they were hostile to the very idea of coordination:
no one was coordinating the hundreds of aid groups… Improving coordination would not be hard, the economists realized…. they designed a simple form and approached donors with a simple request: whenever you send out a consignment, please fill out one of these. There were paper copies available as well as a Web-based form and a call center.
The reaction, when it was not actually hostile, tended to be derisive: “Are you mad? You to want us to spend time filling out forms when people are dying? We need to go and go fast.” Go where? the economists wanted to ask. But nobody seemed to care… the most reputable Pakistani NGO … did not fill out a single form. The United Nations team filled out a few. [Link]
The same sort of thing happened after the Tsunami - plenty of groups stepped in, but their efforts were not coordinated at all, so areas near roads got too much (and often of the wrong stuff) while areas further out went without.
Why don’t they do better? Well, everybody is in such a hurry to do something that nobody wants to do the unglamorous work of coordination so that those most in need get helped. And of course it doesn’t hurt than neither voters nor donors penalize governments or NGOs a year later if it turns out that their efforts yielded nice PR photos but did little to help those most in need.
We need more than feel good efforts, we need either accountability or a whole bleepload of gopher wood.
If you want to donate, a great place to start is one of the International Red Cross groups.
Related posts: Here comes the rain again
