Abstract

United Nations Urban Sustainable Development Goal (USDG) envisages “to make cities and human  settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. For a resilient and safe city, people-oriented developmental plans and risk reduction policies exercise a significant role. To strengthen disaster risk resilience of urban communities, USDG may adopt Community Based Disaster Risk Management (CBDRM) principles for sustainable development of cities and human settlements. However, in reality, the application of CBDRM is found isolated and limited to a few sections as common people are rarely made part of development goal planning and implementation. On the contrary, the top-down approach is often adopted where only institutional policymakers, administrators and experts are involved thereby alienating people who otherwise should have been at the heart of decision making. Thus, arises the need for convergence in administrative and risk governing policies with CBDRM principles for the better attainment of urban risk reduction and development results. Millennium Development Goals foster people based development and environmental sustainability. In this paper, a case study based on CBDRM principles is reported for Silchar Town in Assam, India. Institutional urban risk reduction and administrative plans and policies of government are explored to assess their existing status and check whether there is any convergence with people based CBDRM principles at the grassroots level or are discreet. This study attempts to capture participatory opinion of target people representing several communities of the study area through concordance analysis of variables determine risk due to earthquake, flood, urban flood and fire hazards while predictive urban disaster risk analysis by ANN for two hazards viz. earthquake and urban flood only are reported to which the urban population of the town are more vulnerable and exposed.

Keywords: Disaster, Risk, Urban, Community, Policies, Planning