A natural disaster can be defined as a natural phenomenon, causing enormous environmental, human and material losses. Typical examples of natural disasters include floods, storms, cyclones, earthquakes, forest fire, drought, avalanches and so on. Let’s illustrate them in this essay on natural disasters.
The Indian sub-continent is very vulnerable to certain types of natural disasters, which have an enormous impact on human lives, not to mention resources, thus causing devastating environmental, economic and social losses. That needs to be stressed in an essay on natural disasters.
Natural disasters negatively affect the rural community. Unfortunately, exactly this category of population due to its very low standard of living is especially vulnerable to sudden economic changes. In case of any natural disaster they will be most likely deprived of their means of living. Natural disasters do a great deal of harm: mass migration and destruction, hunger, etc.
The vast majority of essays on natural disasters start with floods. Well, we won’t do any harm if we follow their example. Eastern India is tortured by floods on a regular basis. At that area the Himalayan rivers are used to flooding huge parts of their catchment areas. Floods uproot houses, damage infrastructure and disrupt livelihoods and cause erosion their own banks.
Floods rarely take place in urban areas. It’s because streets normally have drainage systems to withstand excessive water logging. Nevertheless, in 2006 Mumbai, the country’s business hub, heavily suffered from 942mm of rain lashed down. We should confess in this essay on natural disaster that most «natural disasters» is the direct result of negative human activity.
Indeed, what do we, people, do to contribute to floods? That’s hard to take for granted, but we really do a lot to get floods closer. The matter is that the rapid and unstoppable development of Mumbai as well as the flouting of regulations and rules provoked choking and blockage of the Mithi river, flowing through a part of the national business hub and carrying off excessive water to the sea.
Other human environmental «sins» include rough violations of coastal regulation zone rules, uncontrollable and rapid development of green zones, building on open spaces and areas marked for parks. All of this drastically reduces even that little space Indian cities require to absorb heavy rains. Additionally, no all Indian cities have up-to-date drainage systems, while obsolete ones can’t cope with floods.
Another widespread natural disaster in India is drought. More than eight Indian states became victims of severe drought in 2001. The recent researches have proved that severe droughts take place once every eight to nine years in semi-arid and arid zones. The devastating drought of 2002 was acknowledged by the Meteorological Department of India as the toughest drought in this country. The given drought impacted up to 56% of the land mass. It also threatened the livelihoods of approximately 300 million people in 18 Indian states.
India suffered an adverse impact on tough earthquakes during the International Decade of Natural Disaster Reduction. The most significant ones were in Latur, Uttarkashi and Jabalpur. As follows from the Seismic Zonation Map of this country, its north-eastern states, Uttarakhand and the Kutch region of Gujarat are the most venerable areas.
The tragic effect of the earthquakes was greatly enhanced by the fact that many parts of the state were suffering from droughts for several years.
Kutch had to deal with fodder and drinking water scarcity. A lot of men had to migrate for work. As a result, their kids and women were left alone. These categories of Indian population appeared to be the most vulnerable of all the country’s citizens.
Then, we should tell just a few words about cyclones. The states, including Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, not to mention the Bay of Bengal heavily suffered from cyclones. However, the given natural disaster mainly affects the country’s coastal districts. The range of destruction involves up to 100 kilometers from the center of the cyclone. It’s clear that the worst devastation occurs at the time of the highest peak of this disaster.
The Bay of Bengal coastline boasts the world’s shallowest waters, relatively dense population, not to mention an extremely poor economic condition. All of this significantly complicates the overall situation.
Needless to say, cyclones have an extremely devastating effect on the national economy as well as lives of Indians in the affected districts. Lots of people there are roughly deprived of their only source of livelihood. Public infrastructure suffers enormous damage, to say nothing of the state’s economy – the tempo of economic development slows down a lot, to put it mildly.
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