By Mahima A Jain
It has been 11 months since Cyclone Gaja devastated the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu. Rehabilitation programmes worth Rs 1,164 crore (around $161 million) are being unpacked across the state’s several affected districts. But Paneerselvam, a 45-year-old Dalit farm labourer in Thalainayar, a village in the southern district of Nagapattinam, has no hopes of a better future.
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Landless Dalits, living on the margins of settlements, are hit hardest by natural disasters and are the last to get relief supplies which tend to be monopolised by upper and intermediary castes, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2019. In our investigations across Odisha and Tamil Nadu, which were affected by Cyclone Fani in May 2019 and Gaja in November 2018, we found that these marginalised communities are left behind in the subsequent rehabilitation programmes as well.
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Nearly 71% of Dalits work as farm labourers at the bottom of India’s agricultural economy, the 2011 Census showed. But they own only 9% of cultivable land, and nearly 61% of it is smaller than 2 hectares. They need rehabilitation assistance the most in the aftermath of a natural disaster but get its benefits the least because they have no resources they can lay claim to, we found.
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Not only are the poor and vulnerable classes more likely to suffer during a disaster but because they experience slow income growth, they also have a harder time recovering. Between 2 million and 50 million Indians may be pushed into poverty by 2030 for these reasons, according to a UN report on climate change and poverty, which warned of a “climate apartheid”.
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