Disaster Management in Uttar Pradesh
Uttar Pradesh's hazard map
- Floods: the dominant hazard. The Ganga, Ghaghara, Rapti, Sharda, Gandak, Saryu and Yamuna spill almost every monsoon. Eastern UP is worst hit - Gorakhpur, Deoria, Ballia, Azamgarh, Mau, Basti, Siddharthnagar, Sant Kabir Nagar, Barabanki, Bahraich and Lakhimpur Kheri. Much of it is drainage-congestion flooding rather than simple river overflow.
- Drought: Bundelkhand - Jhansi, Jalaun, Lalitpur, Hamirpur, Mahoba, Banda and Chitrakoot - with acute water scarcity and distress migration of people and cattle.
- Earthquakes: most of UP lies in Zone III, while the Terai and Himalayan foothills fall in Zone IV; Lucknow and Kanpur are Zone III. Unengineered construction is the real risk.
- Others: heat and cold waves, lightning deaths, fire in thatched huts and firecracker units, road accidents, and stampedes at the Kumbh Mela and religious fairs.
Institutions
The UP State Disaster Management Authority is chaired by the Chief Minister; the Relief Commissioner, UP runs day-to-day disaster response; the DM chairs the DDMA. The state has SDRF units, CWC flood-forecast stations and the Aapda Mitra scheme of trained community volunteers. The Kumbh Mela, the world's largest temporary city, is managed through sector-based crowd control, CCTV, pontoon bridges and a dedicated mela police - a favourite case study.
Worked example
Explain why Kumbh crowd management is a disaster management exercise. Mass gathering means very high exposure; ghats and narrow bridges are high-vulnerability pinch points; capacity comes from sector plans, one-way routes, public-address systems, trained volunteers, medical camps and lost-person centres. Reducing exposure at pinch points is what brings the risk down.
Traps
Claiming UP faces cyclone landfall; placing Bundelkhand in western UP or calling it flood-prone; naming only NDMA and forgetting the Relief Commissioner and the DDMA.