Community Based Disaster Preparedness Plan (CBDP)

This is an area of Swanirvar's work that is somewhat different from other areas. It is not a continuous project such as education or microfinance but a one time experiment. In 2000 the project area of Swanirvar was the scene of devastating floods. Usually the government approaches the problem of flood relief from the top down. This does not empower the local community to address the issue themselves and it is now widely believed that the top down approach has serious limitations. Most importantly it leaves the villagers completely at the mercy of the government relief agencies which invariably arrive late. Hence an alternative was sought in the form of community based disaster preparedness.

In April 2001, Swanirvar was invited by UNICEF to become the 5th NGO to join the CBDP experiment with 4 others in Nadia district. Swanirvar decided to work with one Gram Panchayat (GP) -Atghara Jasaikat - as the geo-political entity.

In May 2001, some Swanirvar workers were trained in Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) methods after which the GP members were given an orientation. In June 2001, the PLA exercises were done with GP members and selected villagers to understand the floods of 2000. The problems and possible village level actions were identified in three batches, each with 5 booths (a booth is the constituency of a GP member with 600-1200 voters).

In July 2001, a workshop was organized with the GP members to understand the participatory surveys to be done in each booth; then the surveys were done; and finally another post-survey workshop to make booth levels CBDP plans.

In August 2001, all the booth data was put together and a GP level CBDP plan was written. A GP level map was also finalized.

In September 2001, the plans made were presented in the Gram Samsad (GS) meetings. The Atghara-Jasaikati Panchayat office now has a map of the whole GP drawn on its wall, and is probably one of the few GPs in the state to have such a map.

As part of this work, the Swanirvar workers concerned and the key GP members attended 5 monthly reviews, one in each of the participating NGOs at Calcutta, Ranaghat, Krishnanagar, Dattapulia, Swanirvar and Nabadwip.

While the other 4 NGOs involved the women Self Help Group (SHG) members, Swanirvar worked with one Panchayat and its elected representatives. From October 2001 Swanirvar dropped out of that project after completing this panchayat. But the other 4 NGOs have each expanded the flood planning from 4-5 villages to around 50-100 villages. Now all of them are involving the panchayats.