Non-structural measures for flood mitigation

Flood causes enormous loss of life, throws normal life out of gear, leaves large scale destruction of property and crops, disrupts essential services and other developmental activities, creates hue and cry, chaos and loss in confidence in the people and thus costs the country’s exchequer crores of rupees every year. The sustainable development of a country is adversely affected by the fury of floods. It is-not possible in a developing country to ensure foolproof structural protection to the people owing to eco-nomical constraints. In such cases, non-structural flood control measures may be explored. Some of the non-structural measures are proper flood defence education, efficient drainage system and environmental hazard reduction, river control and monitoring of hydraulic structures, floodplain management, flood proofing, watershed management and anti-erosion strategies, flood relief management, flood forecasting and warning, setting up of flood control stations, flood insurance, economical strategies, etc. Computer-mediated communication systems, geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, electronic decision support systems (DSS) and risk-analysis techniques have developed substantially and show-great promise for supporting sustainable flood mitigation. Deserted houses, inundated fields, disrupted services, damaged properties, crops and floating carcasses of dead animals show the devastation of floods which have catastrophic impact on country’s sustainable development. Sustainable development is process-oriented and does not focus on a static world order. As such, flood management involves a-constant search for ways to incorporate mitigative concepts into development decisions to reduce our-vulnerability to natural hazards like floods for today and tomorrow.