A thorough infrastructure review is a must for climate disaster readiness

Failure to formalize the Loss and Damage Fund (LDF) was the biggest disappointment. The LDF has some funding on hand, which may well amount to less than the total pledged. What are the principles on which it will be disbursed? First come first served? Failure to resolve these issues makes climate disaster funding no different post-CoP-28 from what it has been hitherto. Multilateral organizations may provide loans for reconstruction on easy terms. For the rest, the affected nation is left to fend for itself.

Disaster funding is one of the heads under which statutory grants are given annually by the Central government to states, prescribed by Finance Commissions (FCs) along with statutory tax shares. Currently, we are in the funding horizon of the Fifteenth FC, which made a total provision for the five years 2021-26 of ₹1.6 trillion for the state disaster fund which states can routinely access (roughly one-quarter contributed by them); and ₹0.68 trillion for the national fund set aside to supplement the state fund for exceptional disasters. The Sixteenth Finance Commission will cover the five fiscal years 2026-27 to 2030-31.

The types of ‘mitigation’ currently covered by the disaster funding provision pertain to the small or local end, such as improvement of storm-water drainage or construction of flood shelters. These are more usually classified as adaptation measures. So statutory funding to states is for mitigation of impact, rather than mitigation of occurrence. The latter, calling as it does for national decisions on transitioning away from fossil fuels, falls within the jurisdiction of the central government.

An important contribution of the Fifteenth FC was the scoring of each state on a disaster risk index, based on susceptibility to each of four types of hazard: floods; drought; cyclones and earthquakes. Using that prior work, the Sixteenth FC will have to call for a physical audit of the present state of publicly funded infrastructure in hazard prone areas. Without a benchmark of that kind, it is not possible to assess the need for fortification of presently existing infrastructure against hazard risk.

It is no secret that publicly funded infrastructure —buildings, bridges, roads, warehouses, power installations, water and sanitation pipes—is often in a state of serious disrepair. Then there is the problem of rampant urban construction of commercial and residential structures along natural drainage routes of cities, leading to urban flooding even with a heavy rainfall, let alone a disastrous cyclone of the kind that hit Chennai recently. For coastal cities, there is a need for a city-wide audit of drainage routes, and construction of alternative channels to those that have been blocked. Some built residential or commercial structures may well need to be razed to restore former drainage channels, if that is necessary for the survival of the city in future.

There is no provision for systematic physical assessment of structures built with public funds in past years. We have only the periodic compliance and performance audit reports by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) on selected states and sectors. They do not comprehensively assess the condition of all publicly funded structures in a state, but their reports for the particular sector under review are powerfully informative.

To give an example from a recent compliance audit report, a vintage thermal power plant commissioned in 1965 (the name of the state is withheld) was to be replaced by one with lower fuel consumption. An excellent initiative. Work on the new plant started in January 2009, and was scheduled for completion by January 2012. It was finally completed nine years later in July 2021, a delay caused in part because the structure housing the plant was found to be defective and had to be re-built. Had the plant been commissioned in a defective structure, the power plant would have been ripe for destruction in a climate event.

Another recent compliance audit report on local bodies in a state discovered that works fully funded under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGS), reported as completed on the website of the scheme, were functionally incomplete. Among them were information centres (which also serve as emergency shelters) of block-level panchayats with walls but no roofs; and flood embankments not raised up to the height needed for effective protection. In another project to combat flood erosion in fertile cultivable land along one of the major rivers, reported as complete, labour and materials had been paid for, but no work had actually been done.

The Sixteenth FC has an onerous task ahead, to ensure that public infrastructure is assessed for functionality, and fortified so as not to collapse utterly in the face of climate hazards. Physical verification surveys will have to be commissioned in each state, targeting particularly hazard-prone zones.