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Living With Floods: A Comparative Assessment of Resilience to Floods in Tal and Diara Regions of Malda District, West Bengal

Hiranmay Rishi * and Subrata Purkayastha

Corresponding author Email: rishihiran@gmail.com

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.12944/CWE.16.3.16

Tal and Diara regions of Malda district are extremely prone to floods, still, report higher population density than the state's average density. This indicates that the local population has learned to live with floods by developing resilience to the flood threat through better preparedness, coping, and adaptive strategies. Such micro-level strategies developed by the local people can be useful to policymakers and social scientists alike in terms of better mitigating the flood menace and associated vulnerability. This paper attempts to measure and compare the level of flood resilience of the local people living in Tal and Diara at the household level. Furthermore, the article aims to analyse whether the distance from the major flood-causing rivers, viz. Fulhar in Tal and Ganga in Diara play a role in the degree of resilience of the population to floods. The paper is empirical, where information has been collected from sample households and focus group discussion with village elders in two sets of villages, i.e., Maniknagar and Ratua in Tal and Gopalpur and Nurpur in Diara. The UNDP technique has been used to compute the composite Resilience Index (RI) consisting of Preparedness Index (PI), Immediate Coping Index (ICI), and Adaptive Index (AI). The findings suggest that the villages located in and around the levees of major flood-causing rivers, viz. Maniknagar in Tal and Gopalpur in Diara records a higher level of resilience to floods in comparison to the interior villages, viz. Ratua in Tal and Nurpur in Diara. The paper concludes that in both Tal and Diara, people have learned to cope and adapt to floods and that the closer the distance from the major flood-causing rivers, the higher the villagers' resilience to flood hazards.

Distance from Rivers; Flood Hazards; Resilience; Tal and Diara

Copy the following to cite this article:

Rishi H, Purkayastha S. Living With Floods: A Comparative Assessment of Resilience to Floods in Tal and Diara Regions of Malda District, West Bengal. Curr World Environ 2021;16(3). DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.12944/CWE.16.3.16

Copy the following to cite this URL:

Rishi H, Purkayastha S. Living With Floods: A Comparative Assessment of Resilience to Floods in Tal and Diara Regions of Malda District, West Bengal. Curr World Environ 2021;16(3). Available From: https://bit.ly/3i4oB5A

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