Another important aspect of disaster management is providing relief to the victims of disaster. Once evacuated they need food, shelter and medicine against many water-borne diseases mainly caused by the consumption of contaminated water. The total affected people were 20 million and eight million out of these need urgent assistance, six million remained homeless and 3.5 million children stayed exposed to the risk of fatal water-borne diseases.

Moving television images of mounting misery of victims spurred people and government to respond to the urgency . A record average 300mm rains a day badly affected relief activities. Relief activities were badly affected by the lack of sufficient resources and poorly skilled manpower. According to a rough estimate about 40 – 50 billion rupees have been required to gear up the relief activities along with skilled and well trained human resources particularly in health – related matters. Well and effective relief phase of disaster management is the key to achieve through gradual but sustained rehabilitation process

 

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Rehabilitation stands for total improvement of the affected people and areas at least to their pre-disaster position. Rehabilitation generally seeks to re-establish the destroyed infrastructure , communication, system, economic framework and social fabric of the affected areas. Building homes for homeless, providing livelihood for jobless, arrangements until constructing new schools avoiding new taxes on the calamity-hit areas residents apart from waiving of the prior ones. Free seeds and fertilizer provision also become very important because our agriculture – based economy needs quarantine measures in the wake of eventualities. There is also urgent need of rebuilding roads, bridges, canal head works and barrages affected by the disaster to reinvigorate the economic activities.

 

Rehabilitation of local economics of farming activities , livestock, and small business activities. Apart from the government , the role of NGO’s and civil society organization is very imperative to make efforts in fund raising for the timely and smooth revival of normal life of the victims.