Assessment of community based coping mechanism for flooding in rural area: Acase of rural community in Ballia distric, Uttar Pradesh

Abstract

Flood has been a constant threat to human settlement from a very long time and in this modern era nothing has changed much. In India, after analyzing the data of over thirty years, flood is still the most unforgiving disaster and contribute to a major death toll and loss of livelihood. Its occurrence has increased and loss of life and property values, especially in the rural area of our country. Rural communities are especially dependent on natural resources and are therefore significantly impacted by deteriorating environmental conditions and limiting their access during the flood. Flood outbreak is a permanent and annual problem in Ballia district, Uttar Pradesh (which consists of 90% rural area). The flood effects have significantly expanded the severity and nature of social issues. Community is a real sufferer and the first responder so it has to develop its coping mechanisms and strategy to reduce the impact of the disaster. People can play a vital role in the achievement of numerous non-structural measures, for example, awareness generation, prominent learning valorization, data spread, etc. These non-structural measures can help in decreasing the cost of structural measures. The study explores how the rural community of Ballia faces the severe situation of floodin and what types of action (Coping mechanism) they take to mitigate the negative effect of the flood and analyze the effectiveness of this activities on vast extent. This study is based majorly on qualitative mixed research design, where the quantitative data and qualitative information will be gathered simultaneously. Through this thesis, it has been tried to Capture the real-life situation of people and people’s perception before, during and after the flood event from their perspective and describe the situation and the actions which have taken by the community to save their properties and lives and suggest some strategies for strengthening up the existing coping mechanism/traditional knowledge by improving the relation between local bodies and communities for better flood management.