Towards Disaster Resilience Index for Vulnerable Communities: A Mumbai Study

This paper is based on a study that examines an urban coastal area in a developing country and explores how resilience of communities to deal with the potential impact of disasters could be quantified and measured. It is part of a multi-country study supported by the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University. The JTCDM, TISS focussed on India, and attempted a methodology of computing the disaster resilience index of informal settlements in hazard prone areas. It contributes to the discourse around enhancing the resilience of a community, particularly in urban informal settlements in the coastal megacity of Mumbai where disaster impacts are likely to be severe.
It is predicted that disaster events induced due to climatic change will increase and developing countries will be most affected by such variations. Reports suggest that a society, resilient to such impacts with high coping capacity will be better able to survive and bounce back after crisis situations.
The main objective of this study is to work towards developing indicators addressing disaster resilience of communities in urban areas and to compute a resilience index. Such an index would help policy makers identify vulnerable areas, enable comparison and intervene proactively to enhance resilience. The idea of creating a resilience index is expected to provide a simple method of predicting if a community will reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning after a disaster. Since about 40 percent of the people in Mumbai live in slums, certain locales in the city were identified to pilot the methodology of measuring resilience, examining the scenario of specific disasters experienced by them.
Indicators were identified based on the livelihood frameworks and factors considered were physical/ natural (electricity, water supply, accessibility to roads, housing), economic (income, employment, debt), social (knowledge and awareness, social conflict), human (education, health status and infrastructure) and institutional (internal and external). These as indicators collectively add to the understanding of vulnerabilities and coping mechanisms of the community.
Findings of the study have been analyzed in terms of the current status of communities, potential impacts and the strategies for building resilience. The study contributes to the discussion on risks faced by informal settlements with an understanding that more efforts are needed to improve basic infrastructure, access to services and thus strengthen the adaptive capacity of the communities to enhance their resilience.
This preliminary effort to develop an index it is hoped, would help formulate policies with a comparative perspective. It would also help identify areas that are vulnerable and lacking in resilience and requiring urgent attention for intervention at various levels. It could provide critical information for designing pre-disaster intervention strategies especially in vulnerable communities in urban areas.