Human Rights-based Approach to Disaster Management: A Study of Disaster Deaths in Kerala Flood of 2018

Natural disasters cause the deaths of thousands of people and damage property worth millions every year across the world and it is anticipated that more and more people will die due to natural disasters in future because of the climate change and other environmental degradation. Natural hazards are inevitable but what are not inevitable are the deaths of thousands of people. The cause of majority of deaths, though not all, is not due to natural hazards, but due to state‟s failure to adopt disaster risk deduction policies and their timely and effective implementations. It is assumed in the paper that number of deaths in disaster can be reduced to a reasonable extent if „human rights-based approach‟ is adopted in the whole circle of disaster management. In addition to this, disaster management has to work on a framework of avoidable deaths rejecting the traditional notion of inevitability of deaths during disaster. In the above conceptual framework, this paper intends to make an in-depth analysis of the issue of state accountability and lack of administrative measures in mitigating flood and reducing flood-related deaths taking references from the Kerala flood of August 2018 which is considered to be the worst flood in Kerala in the last century claiming the life of more than 483 people in addition to major damage to the infrastructure, economy and livestock. Besides identifying the specific causes and circumstances leading to such a large number of deaths, this paper aims at exploring the administrative possibilities to avoid deaths.