Peoples' Perception and Response to Floodings: The Bangladesh Experience (original) (raw)

1996, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

Bangladesh, a test case of disaster management, has been continuously internalizing lessons learned by the people, the bureaucracy and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), after successfully responding to major natural disasters, particularly floods. The unprecedented flood of 1988 was a great educator to almost all stakeholders in Bangladesh. Since then, it has improved its capacity to cope with disasters despite some failures in its management of the macro-economy and governance. Credit goes mostly to the ordinary people whose resilience and creativity during and after disasters have been quite heroic. This paper makes an attempt at documenting peoples' perception and response to major floods at different stages of the crisis. An illustrative plan for coping with flood disasters encompassing these stages has also been designed and outlined in this paper. We normally recognize English-educated elites as our own people. We never can think of the fact that we are nowhere unless we take the ordinary people as our parts and parcels. We are creating a formidable gap between us and the mass. We have always kept them outside the domain of our discourse (Tagore, 1986: 629). 'control' the rivers of Bangladesh by means of water resource planning. The end result of such planning has not been unequivocally successful and, therefore, controversies abound. Since the devastating floods of 1987 and 1988, these Studles, ~, d~ F 17, A~~~~~~~, controversies have increased. One such Dhaka 1207 Bangladesh controversy, which has visibly emerged recently, Atiur Rahman, Bangladesh Institute of Developmental Volume 4 Number 4 December 1996 hovers around the question of whether to 'manage' o r 'control' floods. Those who want