Evaluation of Reconstruction Practices

Abstract

It has been clearly established that livelihood is a crucial component of recovery, only next to housing reconstruction in importance. The aim of any recovery exercise is to restore lives and livelihoods of the people, refurbish institutions and social networks. Moreover, the recovery exercise is aimed to “build-back better”. This means that the effort is not just to restore the system to pre-disaster levels but rather to address the underlying systemic risks and vulnerabilities that led to the disaster in the first place. Such an intervention will help in preventing future disasters. NGOs have come to play a complementary role in livelihood restoration by providing finance, market intelligence, re-skilling and up-skilling disaster survivors. In case of Gujarat, intervention by SEWA transformed lives of unskilled women survivors and also aided in their psychosocial recovery. In terms of support to agriculture, industry, and services the reconstruction exercise has been evaluated by placing the emphasis merely on the number of beneficiaries, discounting for factors like assistance as proportion of damage, beneficiaries as proportion of people affected, etc. There seems to be consensus across policy documents that livelihood assistance can potentially ensure food security and enable housing reconstruction; however concomitant focus has not been given to the same.

The attempt through this chapter is to revisit the experience of post-disaster livelihood restoration.