Satya N Mohanty must deal with disaster

Jammu & Kashmir has been hit by its worst floods in 100 years. The magnitude of the devastation is being revealed only now as the waters begin to recede. Over 200 lives have been lost and thousands have become homeless. While the armed forces have won fulsome praise for their rescue efforts, the Omar Abdullah government and the National Disaster Management Authority, or NDMA, have drawn flak for their inactivity and lack of preparedness. Satya N Mohanty, the NDMA secretary, who is just back from Srinagar, is dismissive of these allegations and says that teams of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), an arm of NDMA, were on the ground even before the floods struck.

"The Indian Metereological Department gave an alert that there would be heavy rains in the region in the next 48 hours and we immediately positioned the NDRF teams there," says Mohanty. NDRF has 10 battalions drawn from the paramilitary forces, each with 1,149 personnel. In J&K, 22 teams were deployed. Mohanty, 57, a 1980-batch Indian Administrative Service officer of the Andhra Pradesh cadre, has now called back Ernakulam team. "This is the cyclone and flood season. Other states are also vulnerable. They will be deployed there," he says. The requirements for J&K are being determined by its resident commissioner in Delhi. Sourcing and sending those supplies - food, water, medicines, and water treatment plants - in coordination with the Air Force and the Union civil aviation ministry is Mohanty's task. He is the logistics man.

In the states, NDMA coordinates with the State Disaster Management Authority which, in turn, coordinates with the District Disaster Management Authority. The state-level body is headed by the chief minister, and the district-level body by the district collector or district magistrate. In this case, since J&K was cut off from the rest of the country, coordination with the state and the districts became difficult. What also may have hampered work in the state was that the last such floods had occurred over 100 years ago, so there were no ready relief manuals. "There are important lessons to be learnt," Mohanty says. What about the charge that NDMA was caught napping on the job? Through this crisis and even before that, the Meteorological Department's director-general, Laxman Singh Rathore, says, "Mohanty is constantly in touch with me."

Still, NDMA has often drawn flak for its poor response to calamities. The Comptroller & Auditor General has called it "ineffective in most of [its] core areas". This was seen in the Uttarakhand floods in 2013, where a quick response could have saved many more lives. In contrast, the Odisha cyclone in 2013 showed how forward planning and prompt response could minimise damage. "NDMA does not work on its own. The state has to be the lead responder, we are only the emergency supporter," says Mohanty. "Odisha suffered badly in the super-cyclone that hit in 1999. This time around, the state didn't want to leave anything to chance."

Mohanty can neither hog the glory for Odisha nor can he take the blame for Uttarakhand - the NDMA responsibility fell on his shoulders only in June when the vice-chairman and five members resigned their posts on the orders of the new government. All of them had been appointed by the earlier government. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is also the NDMA chairman, wanted the body reconstituted. With these resignations, NDMA was considered virtually defunct.

As secretary, Mohanty is responsible for executing relief operations in consultation with the National Crisis Management Committee of which he is a member. The task of the vice-chairman and other members is confined to policy planning. NDMA today has only one member. Sources say there's a plan to appoint members and the vice-chairman based on their expertise in certain core areas of disaster management, such as earth sciences and oceanography. That's the least that an organisation, which was set up after the 2004 tsunami and is meant to be a nodal agency for relief, rescue and rehabilitation, needs.