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| Socio-Economic Status and Resilience in Post Disaster Society: (A Sociological Study of Chamoli District in Uttarakhand) | |||||||
| Paper Id :
16305 Submission Date :
18/07/2022 Acceptance Date :
22/07/2022 Publication Date :
25/07/2022
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| Abstract | Research examine the how low socio-economic status is directly related to resilient behaviour community. Communities after disaster are prone to collapse according to their vulnerability. Low socio-economic status makes communities more vulnerable and restricts their accessibility towards necessary resources. Result suggests that low socio-economic status is significant variable for research work in a post disaster society. Findings clearly state that lots of work has to be done to improve the socio-economic status of population in normal situation. A direct correlation is found between socio-economic status and resilient behaviour of community irrespective of position in social strata. | ||||||
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| Keywords | SES, Resilience, Vulnerability. | ||||||
| Introduction |
Disaster is not only a word it is an alarm to be attentive and secure yourself and surroundings. Natural disasters have no boundaries it don’t consider the differences in terms of, nations, continents, cultures of societies, and impact varyingly on continents, countries, communities, families and individuals depending on their geographic location, risk exposure and lifestyle choices. According to UN definition “A disaster is a serious disruption to the functioning of a community, which causes human, material, economic and environmental losses beyond a community's ability to cope”. Serious disruption means disturbances at every dimension of life that affects the livelihood and survival of human life. According to Oxford dictionary definition of disaster is “an unexpected event, such as a very bad accident, a flood, or a fire, that kills a lot of people or causes a lot of damage”. Here in this study our focus is how socio-economic status is related to community resilience in post disaster society. Socio-economic status can be defined as a measure of individual’s or family’s social position in respect of others. Whereas resilience is known as “the ability to respond against any kind of adversaries whether natural or manmade” according to UN definition “Resilience is the ability of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essential basic structures and functions”. Researchers have always been keen to study the level of resilience of community against any kind of calamity but here interrelation of socio-economic status and resilience level has been ascertained. Any mountainous or hilly region has always been on the disaster risk situation. Disaster like flood, landslide, and earthquake is very common in hilly areas than to plain. Hence community’s has to be prepared for these kinds of disasters every time. Disaster happens frequently in hilly areas and the most common is flood and land slide. Here in this study state of Uttarakhand has been studied as after the cloudburst in 2013 and subsequently the monstrous flood engulfed as much human life that cannot be counted. Families are still not aware regarding the missing members during that flood. Individual’s socio-economic status defined their vulnerability in society. Low socio-economic status increases the vulnerability of community so as individuals. Hence SES (Socio-economic status) is directly proportional to the level of individual’s vulnerability. Basically in post disaster society low SES resulted into huge loses than to high SES. A post disaster society always strives for settlement and rehabilitation. They just came out of a nightmare hence the most basic need in post disaster society is to readjust the disturbed areas. Various studies have been done related to SES and disaster but very little study correlates the interrelation between SES and community Resilience in a post disaster society.
Scientifically there are five phases of disaster management cycle, i.e. prevention, mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery. Lots of sociological study focused on pre disaster and during disaster time, but very little study has focused on post disaster society during and after recovery phase. The objective of this paper to find out how low socio-economic status is directly restrict the resilient behaviour of community and push them towards more vulnerable position. Their vulnerability added with low socio-economic status hampers them to recover as early as compare to high socio-economic status after disaster. After eight years how the community is surviving? , what kind of issues is being faced by the population? how their low SES is still hounding them to be more vulnerable and put them on the brink of risk? |
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| Aim of study | The broad objective of the present study is to explore the various dimension of flood affected population with special emphasis of socio-economic aspect. The specific objectives of the study are: 1. To find out the socio-economic status of disaster affected population. 2. To explore the link between socio-economic status and resilient behavior among the community. 3. To find out the health related issues in post disaster society. | ||||||
| Review of Literature | It is necessary to understand the
foundation research argument to find the gap in the particular study.
Individuals and families from low socio-economic backgrounds are often
economically disadvantaged, sometimes intergenerationally, causing them to be the
least prepared for and able to respond to a disaster. According to the theory
of ‘culture of poverty’ a concept given by Oscal Lewis in 1960s there are some
traits that is transmitted cross-generationally within families and
prevented individuals from taking advantage of economic opportunities. This
creates a vicious cycle of poverty that has to break to improve the social
condition. Selected researches have been gone through to ascertain the gap in
research related to this topic. Kwok et al.
(2016) in their
study they focused on various social resilience and disaster response.
Attributes like, community gathering place, societal support, and awareness and
knowledge related to disaster risk reduction, collective efficacy and sense of
community all are helpful to promote social resilience so as repose during and
after disaster. Hence it
is through economic resilience that social and community resilience emerges. T Melissa et. al. (2018) found that how low socio-economic status is responsible for their vulnerability and incapacity to response against adverse impact of disaster. Their information seeking behaviour is also not as much effective as others from high socio-economic status. Hence low socio-economic status makes them more vulnerable in terms of response against disaster and early warnings provided by the governmental and non governmental agencies. Whereas Smith (2013) explained the environmental and demographic trends that are leading to more extreme disasters and associated socio-economic trauma, especially for more vulnerable populations (e.g., lower socio-economic groups, children, older adults). Therefore in the nutshell Impact of disaster and vulnerability reciprocate each other. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 calls for the reduction of disaster risks through an “all-of-society” and “all-of-State institutions” engagement approach that emphasises the important role that local governments and communities play in reducing vulnerabilities and enhancing community resilience. S. wolf (2016) indentified economic status is the key to the resilient behavior of community. Lack of land resource is the cause of weak resilience of community. He further stated the generic technique must be applied to research the resilience behavior. Particularly for localized infrastructure at community level. S. Z. Levine in (2009) et. al. in their study found that low posttraumatic disorder affected population showed maximum resilience. In other words the growth of resilience, in inversely proportional to traumatic disorder. Low socio-economic status resulted into high post traumatic disorder. Therefore to check PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) it is necessary to improve social-economic status of population. Accordingly Kimberley et.al. (2000) in their study found that consequences of natural disaster directly impacts public health and health care system. He stressed that strong public health system definitely reduce the morbidity and mortality in disaster hit areas. |
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| Methodology | a. Primary Data-
Interview schedule has been prepared to collect the primary information. Interviews of key informants, selected weaker population like women, SC/ST etc has been taken. Household survey has been done to know the living conditioning of the weaker population, how they are striving for daily needs, how they are surviving after disaster and what is their present social position? Head of each house hold were selected to know their experience in social strata before and after disaster.
b. Secondary Data-
Secondary data collected through census report and government records from their offices. Information of villages, household and population collected through census data.
c. Techniques of data collection-
Purposive homogenous sampling technique (non probability sampling method) has been adopted to select the villages and household of each village. Households have been selected on the basis of Low socio-economic status irrespective of caste and religion. Communities belongs to vulnerable groups have been selected purposefully to collect the data to know how low socio-economic status and vulnerability is directly related to each other.
d. Key Informants Interviews
Key informants were selected through snow ball sampling. After explaining the research background to the local educated/aware village members like student, member from panchayat, teachers, employed person etc. he/she was requested to take us the required respondents. Initially interview was conducted among the households with low SES with greater focus on vulnerable communities (SC/ST/Woman headed) severely affected by 2013 flood further followed the same procedure to both the villages guided by the local teacher. Total 10 interviews were done. A common discussion was done at the commencement of the interview with the locals, teachers, student etc who were the eyewitness of disastrous event. Whole interview was focused on the communities like SC/ST/Women/Senior Citizens etc and families having low socio-economic status. It was hard to find the targeted respondents as villages were very severely damaged resulted into the migration to some safer place like Dehradun, Haridwar, Rishikesh as these are geographically not vulnerable or least vulnerable. Discussion was focused on low SES more vulnerability and least social resilience in post disaster society. How being low SES irrespective of caste and religion breeds poverty and vulnerability that eventually leads to very low potential of resilient behaviour of disaster affected community in post disaster society. |
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| Findings | Participants of both the villages provide details related to their low SES and struggle to cope the post disaster social order. After carefully analyse the obtained data different outcomes are as follows. 1. Maximum low SES population were belongs to SC/ST caste before disaster but after disaster it has been observed that population belongs to low socio-economic status increased dramatically including other castes also. 2. Resilient behaviour among low SES populations are very weak but those who were not in the strata of low SES before disaster and degraded to low SES after disaster due to huge economic loss have shown resilient behaviour not as expected but more than those who were already in poor condition before disaster. 3. Women and girls are the worst affected population due to disaster but they have tremendously shown her resilient behaviour during and after disaster even though they don’t have freedom as compare to men due to rigid social structure. 4. Low SES population even have very weak knowledge of early warning announcement by the authority. 5. Religious belief were still prevalent among all sections of society. 6. Lack of authentic data is also responsible for post disaster chaos. 7. More open families where individual’s freedom granted to women or girls were high have shown surprisingly high resilient behaviour. It is found that both the villages have had population belongs to high and low SES and both suffered from the flood occurred in 2013. | ||||||
| Conclusion | Each and every family have lost something or someone as the impact of disaster was so massive and gigantic that no one could be able save themselves. Here in this study finding directly pointing towards the low SES among population is responsible for weak recovery and reestablishment. T Melissa et al. (2018) in their study found that low socio-economic status and weak receptive capacity to know the early warnings is directly related to each other. Here in this study it has been established that low socio-economic status, vulnerability, and weak resilient behaviour all are interlinked and depends direct to each other. Poverty is more prevalent in hilly region in caparison to plain areas. District like Chamoli is located at hilly region hence here poverty is more than other plain areas. G Gioli et al. (2019) in their study of poverty in mountains found that poverty is more in mountains than to plain because of bad planning and acute shortage of data related to poor population. Therefore to manage post disaster impact we must prepare a data base of population belongs to low socio-economic status. Geographical vulnerability make the population even more vulnerable here maximum impact faced by the population belongs to the low SES as well as poor population. Untouchability is also a major issue that need to be addressed in hilly areas. In this study it has been ascertain that untouchability is a prevalent practice in these regions and due to this certain community face exclusion and uncertainty. Post disaster society is the study of community affected with disaster as a whole. An approach that demands a holistic study hence irrespective of low and high socio-economic status in this study it has been found that resilient behaviour and low socio-economic status make any community even more vulnerable and more prone to collapse during and after disaster. | ||||||
| Suggestions for the future Study | 1. Post disaster society basically includes recovery and rehabilitation as per this study it being suggested that socio-economic status must be included in the management plan, 2. Gender issues must be addressed with utmost caution as emotions use to be at its height after disaster. 3. KAP (Knowledge, attitude and practice) model should be applied during post disaster preparedness as community or society has to make adaptable with the new environment and settlement. Firstly they should aware about the aftermath, secondly their attitude must be change as the new settlement would be completely different like their neighbours, housing pattern, might be family members, location, social status etc wouldn’t be the same after disaster, and thirdly they would be prepared to practice all these in their day to day life after disaster. 4. Sensitization programme, psychological counselling, WASH (Water, sanitation and Hygiene) related issues must be addressed by government agencies on priority basis. 5. Primary needs (food, water, and sanitation) and employment generation programme must be delivered just after the rehabilitation programme. Schemes like MNREGA, Skill development programmes, free rations schemes, unemployment bhatta etc. added with and flood relief fund must be released immediately with strict accountability on officials and rescue workers. 6. Role of NGOs, civil societies, Panchayats, cooperative societies etc. must be appreciated and applause to push them further as locals are more friendly to them instead the government appointed officials. Language is also one of the most significant component that must be in the priority list to address the local needs. Here NGOs, PRIs etc will be more helpful and outcome would be more fruitful. 7. One of the most significant factors that have to be address among all sections of society is to make them tech savvy. As in present context information moves faster than anything and early warning massages must be reach them at least two to three day in advance hence technology can be a facilitator to reduce the impact disaster before and after. 8. Last but not the least Policy framework must be inclusive and separate for hilly states for any infrastructural development like, housing, hospital, electricity, mobile towers etc. |
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