by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate, Corporate finance, Finance, News
Mumbai : Private life and non-life insurers – Bharti AXA Life Insurance and Bharti AXA General Insurance – on Monday announced a simplified claims procedure for flood victims of Kerala and Karnataka.
In a joint statement issued here Bharti AXA Life Insurance said it has simplified the claim processing for the flood victims of Kerala and Karnataka in three steps – written intimation from the nominee along with cancelled cheque of the nominee’s bank account; death certificate from any authorised hospital or police or armed forces; and Aadhar card of the nominee.
“In view of the deluged-ravaged Kerala and some districts of Karnataka and resultant loss of lives, we have set up a dedicated assistance cell at each district in Kerala and the flood-hit districts of Karnataka for simplified life claims with minimal documents.
We understand the plight of our customers and endeavour to settle eligible claims expeditiously. If death certificate is not available, we shall accept a certificate from police, armed forces or any authorised hospital certifying the death of the life insured,” Vikas Seth, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Bharti AXA Life was quoted as saying in the statement.
The company has also extended the existing grace period of 15 days or 30 days as applicable to 60 days for payment of premiums due during the period from 15th July 2018 to 30th September 2018 and waived off late or penalty fees on such due premium.
Similarly, Bharti AXA General Insurance has formed help desks to support and guide its customers and instructed its nodal officers and branches in Kochi, Trivandrum, Thrissur, Kotayam and Calicut to fast-track claim settlement processes in the flood-devastated Kerala and the flood-hit districts of Karnataka.
“We have introduced documentation waivers in support of motor claims. Survey has been waived for minor losses, if the insured is able to share the photographs through digital media. On basis of that, remote survey will be conducted and claim shall be processed.
No insistence on Registration Certificate, if it has been lost in flood and the claim shall be processed based on the soft copy available in the online portal,” Sanjeev Srinivasan, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, Bharti AXA General Insurance, was quoted in the statement.
Bharti AXA General Insurance has waived monetary claim letter, damage certificate and letter of subrogation for claims up to Rs 1 lakh.
The company has also decided to skip estimate of loss for completely submerged vehicles in Kerala and Karnataka floods and expedite claim settlement.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By Rajendra Shende,
Twenty years ago, in August 1998, then Chinese Prime Minister ` proposed, in a meeting of China’s State Council, a total ban on logging in the forest slopes of Sichuan province. It was in response to the devastating flood-crisis that China was facing in the Yangtze river basin.
That policy was enacted overnight, while the floods in Yangtze river were still at its peak and rescue operations were in full swing. It was just a year after the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, but Zhu was in no mood to analyse if that extreme event was due to climate change.
He cited that similar devastation had occurred due to Yangtze floods in 1870, 1931 and 1954 when climate change was not around. Zhu declared severe punishment for logging in the same meeting and incentivised afforestation with ambitious targets by 2000 and 2010.
The same month, but now 2018, India is facing the devastation in Kerala, the worst ever since 1924. With over 400 dead and a million homeless, the questions are gushing like the waters from the flood gates of its dams. Is it a natural or man-made disaster? Is it climatic event or due to global warming?
It is easy and convenient to link the causative chain to climate change. Indeed, global warming has led to a rise in ocean and atmosphere temperatures (nearly one degree Celsius over pre-industrial times) which has resulted in the increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events over the last six decades.
To this extent, global warming is indeed responsible for higher rainfall. But that does not explain “extreme” and “localised” rainfall. Blaming each of such weather disasters on climate change has in reality become a way for the authorities to absolve themselves from their essential responsibility of preventing the consequential colossal damage to life, infrastructure and ecosystems. Unprecedented rainfall could not have been prevented, whether it is due to global warming or not, but the resulting catastrophe could have been contained.
Indiscriminate logging in Kerala has reduced the forest cover between 1920 and 1990 by 40 per cent, according to the report of Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel. Nearly one million hectares of the forest land has been lost between 1973 and 2016, as per an Indian Institute of Science report. This has reduced the soil’s capacity to hold the mud-slides. Illegal mining, including that of sand and stones that “bank” the flood waters, is rampant in Kerala. Over-enthusiastic water tourism has allowed the infrastructure and habitat to be vulnerably exposed to the flood waters. The uncoordinated dam-water management has left the communities and wildlife to find their own ways to save their lives.
Is there way out?
There are numerous examples and initiatives to learn from and to participate in. The Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission of NASA and the Japan Aerospace Agency predicted the Kerala floods just a few days in advance. Collaboration with GPM and initiating disaster management measures “just-in-time” could still would have helped.
Switzerland (about the same size as Kerala) has 200 major dams as against Kerala’s 61. Switzerland’s designated central authority coordinates safety and the operation of the flood gates. Collaborating with Switzerland on such dam-management and inundation-mapping would prepare India in future. In Kerala, dam safety analysis had not been done for any of its 61 dams.
China has now acquired huge experience in disaster and flood management; five most deadly floods in human history were all in China. Cooperation with China would go a long way in managing and containing the flood damage.
(The author is Chairman TERRE Policy Centre and former Director UNEP. The views expressed are personal. He can be contacted at shende.rajendra@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News
By Bhasker Tripathi,
New Delhi : Keralas once-in-a-lifetime rainfall was 2,378 mm over 88 days, four times more than normal — but 30 per cent less and spread over 61 days more than the deluge of 1924, the most intense flood in the states recorded history, submerging as it did almost the entire coastline.
So why was the flood of 2018 as devastating as the 3,368 mm rainfall that Kerala received 94 years ago? That’s because Kerala has reduced its capacity to deal with such extreme floods by allowing illegal stone quarrying, cutting down forests and grasslands, changing drainage patterns and sand mining on river beds, said experts.
“Rampant stone quarrying and digging of pits is the reason behind the landslides and landslips, which worsened the situation in the Kerala floods,” Madhav Gadgil, ecologist and founder of the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, told IndiaSpend. “These quarries cause deforestation and block the natural streams, which help in reducing the intensity of the floods.”
Most of the 373 casualties in Kerala were caused by landslides in the northern districts of Malappuram and Wayanad, and the central district of Idukki.
Gadgil is the lead author of a 2011 government-commissioned study written by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) — commonly called the Gadgil committee report — which he headed. The report recommended that development be restricted in the Western Ghats, which sprawls across six states, including Kerala.
“Our vulnerability to extreme rainfall is increasing as land development is changing drainage patterns,” Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, told IndiaSpend.
Most of the regions overwhelmed by the recent floods were classified as “ecologically sensitive zones” — where there should be limited or no construction or deforestation — by the Gadgil committee.
In 2011, the Centre and the Western-Ghats states, including Kerala, refused to accept the Gadgil committee report.
Spread across 160,000 sq km, more than three times the size of Haryana, the Western Ghats extends over six states — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, Maharashtra and Gujarat — along India’s western coast.
The rain and tropical forests of the Ghats are one of the world’s 10 “biodiversity hotspots”, home to the most diverse range of life in the subcontinent: 7,402 species of flowering plants, 1,814 species of non-flowering plants, 139 mammal species, 508 bird species, 179 amphibian species, 6,000 insects species and 290 freshwater fish species. The Ghats are also a source of about 20 rivers and tributaries watering the Indian peninsula, and its forests and grasslands act as a super sponge, soaking up excess rain.
With the biodiversity, water security and retention characteristics in mind, the Gadgil committee suggested classification of the Ghats into three zones: Ecologically highest sensitive zones (ESZ1), where certain types of areas would be “no-go”; ecologically high sensitive zones (ESZ2), where construction of new railway lines and major roads would not be allowed, except when “highly essential”; and ecologically moderately sensitive zones (ESZ3), where new energy projects and infrastructure such as roads may be allowed but with “strict environmental regulations”.
The committee’s recommendations included restrictions on mining and quarrying, use of land for non-forest purposes and no construction of high-rises.
“A study in the southern region, comprising the states of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, showed that between 1920-1990 about 40 per cent of the original forest cover was lost or converted to another form of land use,” said the Gadgil committee report.
“Change in land use of forests exposes the region to such [Kerala-like] calamities,” said Gadgil, whose point has been that the scale of the disaster could have been reduced.
Like other experts, V.S. Vijayan, a member of the Gadgil committee and former chairman of Kerala State Biodiversity Board, told IndiaSpend that cutting trees in the catchment areas of dams, illegal construction and farming on slopes exceeding 30 degrees were among the main reasons for flood devastation.
“Many of these activities end up loosening the soil, making it susceptible to landslides,” said Vijayan. “We had recommended against all of these practices in the Gadgil committee report, but no one listened.”
One of the main reasons for the rejection of the Gadgil committee report was the government’s confusion between the definition of ecologically sensitive zones and ecologically fragile areas, according to Vijayan.
Kerala has a 15-year-old law called the Ecologically Fragile Lands Act, which says people can be evicted from protected areas, such as wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. The government thought that the ecologically sensitive zones were essentially the same, “which was not the case”, said Vijayan.
“We clearly divided the entire Ghats into three zones based on their ecology and needs of protection,” said VIjayan. “It never meant that humans were to be evicted from sensitive areas.”
Extreme rainfall events cannot be stopped, but the impact of floods can be reduced if forests and natural landscapes are used as shields, he said.
When winds from the west slam against the Western Ghats, clouds form and rain falls. In general, stronger winds lead to more intense rain, D. Shivanand Pai, head of the climatic prediction group at the India Meteorological Department, Pune, told IndiaSpend.
In the monsoon of 2018, the “pressure gradient” — which determines pressure changes and, in turn, rainfall — between land and the Arabian sea was “very strong”, said Pai, causing heavy rain. “A low pressure developed in the Bay of Bengal and moving inland contributed to the heavy rain by making the winds stronger.”
What Kerala witnessed was an event of high intensity rainfall over a short span of time. The intensity of such heavy rainfall events have been rising across India. Over 110 years to 2010, heavy rainfall events in India show an increasing trend of six per cent per decade, said a November 2017 study co-authored by Pai, who said high-intensity rainfall results from rising temperatures caused by climate change.
India could see a six-fold increase in population exposed to the risk of severe floods by 2040 — to 25 million people from 3.7 million facing this risk between 1971 and 2004 – according to a 2018 study published in Science Advances, a peer-reviewed journal.
(In arrangement with IndiaSpend.org, a data-driven, non-profit, public interest journalism platform, with whom Bhasker Tripathi is principal correspondent. The views expressed are those of IndiaSpend. Feedback at respond@indiaspend.org)
—IndiaSpend/IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Opinions
By T.P. Sreenivasan,
When one of the rulers of Travancore, now a part of the southern Indian state of Kerala, handed over the reins of his territory to Lord Padmanabha, the presiding deity of Thiruvananthapuram, and undertook to take care of it in the Lords name, his idea was that he had assumed even greater responsibility as he was answerable to the Almighty.
But the characterisation of Kerala as “God’s own country”, though made as a tribute to its beauty and tranquility, has an unfortunate connotation that the welfare of the state is in the hands of God and the people have been absolved of responsibility of safeguarding its future. “God alone knows”, “God save his own country” and such comments are common at times of crises. No wonder, therefore, that the devastating floods of August have been attributed by some to the ire of gods.
Many believe stoically that the recent debate regarding certain rituals and practices in the temples has displeased the gods. But the most important consequence of the current crisis is the realisation that the responsibility of taking care of the safety and security rests squarely on the people themselves.
The figures of deaths and displacement of people and loss of infrastructure may not be alarming by international standards, but for a small state like Kerala, more than 350 deaths, 800,000 people displaced, 4000 relief camps and 10,000 km of roads damaged and its global award winning airport damaged are beyond its capacity to endure and to overcome.
It took the international media and the United Nations a whole week to realise that this is a tragedy of humongous proportions. National and international assistance is pouring in rather belatedly after the state was stretched beyond its capacity to save lives. It took time even for the Government of India to realise the extent of the tragedy.
It goes to the credit of the state government voluntary organisations that no time was lost in launching rescue and relief efforts with wide participation of the people. Normally a state torn by political, religious and caste strife, where violence is not uncommon, Kerala rose to the occasion, leaving aside the differences and without engaging in the blame game.
The stunning effect of the tragedy metamorphosed the community. Kerala’s addiction to social media, which was considered an evil, played a major role in rescue operations. Of course, some depraved minds used the social media either to spread false information or to discredit the relief effort.
“Accidents are inevitable, but disasters are not” is the repeated refrain of Muralee Thummarukudy, the chief of the disaster management unit of the UN in Geneva, who has come to be known as “Nostradamus of Kerala” because of the dire predictions he had made about such a disaster after he saw what had happened in Uttarakhand.
But it will take a long time to assess what could have been done and what should be done in the future. The only disaster of a similar nature the Kerala remembers rather vaguely is the flood of 1924. The lessons learnt from that experience have been lost after a century.
But what could have been done was to locate the water levels recorded in certain places and avoided building homes and other facilities above those levels or moved away from those areas altogether. This was obviously not done because of a feeling that history would not be repeated.
Then there was the Madhav Gadgil report on the Western Ghats, which had suggested several measures to preserve the ecology of the region. Gadgil himself agrees that there was an intense rainfall which has caused this, but he goes on to say that “I am quite convinced that the last several years’ developments in the state have materially compromised its ability to deal with events like this and greatly increased the magnitude of the suffering that we are seeing today. Had proper steps been taken, the scale of the disaster would have been nowhere near what it is today.”
In its report submitted in 2011, the Gadgil panel had suggested measures for the preservation of the natural environment of the ecologically fragile Western Ghats region. The report had recommended that the entire Western Ghats, spread over six states, including Kerala, be declared ecologically sensitive.
Then the Environment Ministry appointed another panel, headed by the space scientist K Kasturirangan, to “examine” the Gadgil committee report in a “holistic and multidisciplinary” fashion. His report, published in 2013, severely watered down the recommendations of the Gadgil panel, effectively suggesting that only a third of the Western Ghats be identified as being ecologically sensitive.
Even the second report was not implemented and care was not taken even to prevent encroachments around the sensitive dams.
The theory that implementation of the Gadgil or Kasturirangan report may have prevented the tragedy does not stand against the evidence that great floods had taken place periodically even when the Western Ghats were pristine without human habitation. The biggest floods, even the biblical and mythical ones, cannot be attributed to human activity.
The generally accepted conclusion that human activity causes climate change, which leads to disasters, may be true only to a certain extent. Otherwise, we may not be able to explain phenomena like the extinction of the dinosaurs without man- made ecological changes.
The more pertinent reason could be the intensity of the precipitation and the inadequate protection and management of the dams. Natural calamities will take place regardless of the precautions, but what is needed is a disaster warning system and the machinery to mobilise people and provide them the means of survival and sustenance. We should also not lose sight of the precarious condition of the Mullaperiyar dam, a mighty water bomb, which remains unattended because of the disputes between Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
The number of deaths in Kerala did not rise sharply because of the timely help of volunteers. Even though it was brought to the attention of the Ministry of External Affairs that this tragedy merited international assistance, the government stuck to its policy of self reliance, even after the disaster was recognized as a Type 3 one.
The policy is based on the premise that India is now powerful enough to give rather than take assistance. But the massive rehabilitation and reconstruction work is clearly beyond our means and presents a big challenge.
As a frontrunner in the health sector in the country, Kerala has another challenge to prevent the outbreak of an array of communicable diseases in the aftermath of the floods. Mercifully, the government is willing to work with the UN and the Red Cross to frame projects to be funded by them. The window of opportunity presented by the generous assistance pouring in must be utilized to build a modern Kerala, free of the pitfalls of the unscrupulous activities of the past.
(The author is a former Ambassador of India and Director General, Kerala International Centre. The article is in special arrangement with South Asia Monitor)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Economy, Finance, News
Mumbai : The State Bank of India (SBI) has donated Rs 2 crore for the Kerala flood victims and initiated several other ground-level measures in the deluged state, an official said on Saturday.
The SBI has encouraged all its 270,000 staffers to contribute to the Chief Minister’s Distress Relief Fund (CMDRF), and the bank would contribute an equivalent amount.
It also announced a waiver of fees and charges on services like loans for flood relief, duplicate passbooks, ATM cards, cheque books and EMI delays, besides making attempts to restore the working of branches and ATMs in the flood affected regions of the state.
Besides, the SBI has decided to waive all charges on remittance to the CMDRF, penalty on non-maintenance of minimum account balance from proceeds of relief fund provided by the government and agencies and if already recovered, such charges would be refunded for customers in the state.
The bank has extended Xpress Credit to existing customers with relaxed norms for a month, deployed cash at PoS (Point of Sale) to enable people avail Rs 2,000 to meet daily cash requirements across the state.
Persons who have lost or displaced personal documents can open small accounts with only photos and signature or thumb impressions and all employees of SBI deployed to address requirements of the customers and ensure best possible service.
At least 180 persons have lost their lives, thousands displaced or stranded as incessant rains pounded Kerala since the past 10 days, causing havoc in 12 districts.
—IANS
