By Imlisanen Jamir
Governments that have failed at prevention develop a particular fondness for the word management. They speak of frameworks, of holistic approaches, of multi-stakeholder coordination. The Nagaland State Disaster Management Plan, tabled in the recent session of the state legislature by the Chief Minister himself, is a document written in exactly this language, and it is worth pausing over what that language conceals as much as what it declares.
The plan is, by its own account, a serious piece of work. It identifies the hazards facing the state with reasonable accuracy: earthquakes, landslides, floods, fires, the slow creep of drought, the sudden violence of chemical accidents. It speaks of community participation, of integrating traditional tribal knowledge, of building capacity at the village level. It proposes annual reviews. It envisions a Nagaland where communities react to disasters with urgency but in a planned way. These are not ignoble ambitions, and the incorporation of indigenous wisdom into formal disaster frameworks is genuinely worth attention.
But buried in the plan’s own executive summary is a sentence that deserves more scrutiny than it will likely receive. The rising frequency and severity of disasters in the state, the document acknowledges, has been driven by rapid population growth, increased concentration of people in hazardous zones, and lack of adequate infrastructure. This is the state government, in other words, identifying the state government’s own failures as the preconditions for the crisis it now proposes to manage. The roads that do not hold. The hillsides cleared for construction that no environmental assessment would have approved on honest terms. The settlements that crept into flood corridors because nobody stopped them, or because the people who could have stopped them had other interests to protect. All of this is present in that sentence, in compressed and diplomatic form.
The plan does not address any of it. It cannot, because a disaster management plan is by definition a document about response, not about cause. It is a plan for after the landslide, not for the decades of decisions that loosened the hill. And there is nothing technically wrong with that: response mechanisms are necessary and the state has been without an adequate one for too long. But there is something deeply uncomfortable about a government that approves construction on unstable slopes, that has presided over the systematic degradation of forest cover, that has allowed infrastructure to decay to the point where a moderate rainfall becomes a crisis, now presenting itself as the body that will save lives when the consequences arrive.
Nagaland is not unique in this. Across the northeastern states, and across much of the country, disaster management has become the preferred institutional response to environmental negligence. It is cheaper, politically, to build a better early warning system than to enforce the land use regulations that would make the warning unnecessary. It is easier to coordinate relief after a flood than to ask why the drainage was never built, or why the riverbank was sold off, or who benefited from the permissions that should never have been granted. Management of this kind is not without value, but it has a way of becoming a substitute for the harder work, a way of appearing to take the problem seriously while the conditions that produce the problem are left undisturbed.
Some of its provisions will be implemented, and when the next disaster comes, officials will point to the framework as evidence of preparedness. What it will not do, because it was not designed to do it, is reckon with the fact that the state has been, in the most literal sense, manufacturing the emergencies it now proposes to handle with greater efficiency.
That reckoning requires a different kind of document, and a different kind of political will, neither of which was tabled in the legislative assembly.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
