Gender Aspect of Disaster Management in India

The various role definitions of male and female in day to day life show that they are favorably titled towards male population when it comes to resource allocation, daily job roles of earning livelihood or even using available resources for the family. This makes them vulnerable, and impact of disasters increase pre-existing vulnerabilities in everyday life of women. In case of Natural Disasters, the role of female cannot be ignored as a victim of the event and as the partner in the process of repair and rebuilding of the affected area. As a victim they face more hardships in the form of resource crunch, as priority of everything is reserved for male members, females get access to food or medical relief at the last ladder of support. Further, in calamities and disasters they get additional burden of taking care of kids, arrangement and safety of food and water, taking care of ailing or injured family members etc. even the safety of females in such situation is a big cause of concern. Geographical and socio-cultural diversity of India also gives different dimension to these gender based vulnerability of females. There is ample scope of involvement and empowermentof the women in Disaster Risk Management and Mitigation program at every level to reduce the vulnerability of the society and capability to bounce back to normalcy in lesser time span. The proposed paper attempts to find out the areas in Disaster Management wherein females can be protected and can be banked upon to support the development process in affected areas with limited resources.