Agency

Political inaction, poor decision-making and bad management in Bangladesh and other South Asian countries have turned the region into the most disaster-prone in the world, according to an international aid agency report launched Thursday.

Oxfam International that prepared the report, "Rethinking disaster," lauded Bangladesh for what it said was "impressive commitment" in the area of disaster-risk reduction.

Much of the report highlights why death and destruction in natural disasters are not nature's fault but the outcome of human failure. "Although nature traditionally gets the blame, it is human failure that turns a natural shock such as a cyclone into a humanitarian disaster," the report says.

The report points to the enormous human and monetary costs of disasters in South Asia as a whole. The report says South Asia as a region loses up to 6 percent of its GDP to disasters a year.

In Bangladesh, Cyclone Sidr killed about 4,000 people and washed away the homes of about 1.5 million families. Food and disaster adviser AMM Shawkat Ali unveiled the report at the CIRDAP auditorium in the city.

"Bangladesh proves a number of success stories, especially in terms of illustrating the argument that disaster preparedness costs a fraction of what a response can cost," the report said.

The report recommended that Bangladesh implement the disaster management regulative framework and realise communities' rights to consultation and information about the assistance they receive in a disaster situation.

"The experience in Bangladesh has proven that disaster-risk reduction is worth the investment," said Heather Blackwell, country programme manager for Oxfam International, at the report launch ceremony.

"Thousands of lives and livelihoods have been saved by the creation of early warning system, cyclone and flood shelters, the raising of homesteads and other risk reduction measures," she said.

She also expressed worries about the preparedness of the people to such disaster saying: "Most of the families who are rebuilding their homes have not gotten any support and training to make them more resilient to the next cyclone or storm surge."

"What's even more worrying is the fact that more than 320,000 families do not have the means to rebuild at all without external assistance, and so far only one-fifth of them have been promised aid," she added. Adviser AMM Shawkat stressed a change in thinking about the disaster management.

"Time has come to rethink of disasters," he said. He said the act on disaster management was almost complete. The government spent Tk 2 billion in the Sidr-hit areas after the cyclone had hit the coast.

The report's suggestions for Bangladesh included investment in infrastructure for flood and cyclone shelters, installing adaptation measures across the flood-prone areas, enacting national policy on disaster management, formulating a national building code, devising a 15-year strategy with community involvement to determine the roadmap for change.

The Bangladesh Economic Association chief, Prof Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad, criticised the political governments saying that there was no energetic political will to cut damage caused by natural disasters in the country.

Kholiquzzaman observed that Bangladesh suffered lack of political will to alleviate poverty and prevent disasters like river erosion. KH Masud Siddiqui, director general of the Disaster Management Bureau, also spoke.