Deliberating on the need of financing risk management and recovery, a host of humanitarian agencies today aired their views for closer partnership, pooling of resources and strengthening local system during emergencies. Although the answers to how it can be done continue to remain elusively vague.

About 49 participants from around 40 government, non-government organizations, media and corporates were observing the world humanitarian day on August 19, 2016 at India Habitat Center organized by Caritas India in collaboration with Change Alliance and Sphere India, Oxfam, Efficor, ADRA and Islamic Relief.

Projecting India as one of the fasting growing economy, have drastically reduced funds for humanitarian needs in India. The present funding gap in India is at 91 percent from all sources (over 765 Cr.), informed Prof. Vinod Menon, former member of NDMA. He later went on to suggest that role of private sectors could partly fill the gap in both pre and post disaster response scenario.

In the last 16 years, Caritas India alone has experienced a fund reduction by 78 percent, calculated Anjan Bag from Caritas India.

Prof. Menon explained that like the legend of David and Goliath, challenges of governance, civil society accountabilities, unmet needs et al. are too huge to miss and we need to look for a weaker spot to topple the situation in favor.

We need to account for the money that was spent since 2005 (the year NDMA was formed) until 2015 and how much fund is available from now until 2030, so that proper fund allocation can be made in areas that need urgent attention to effectively do away challenges of financing risk management and recovery, he suggested.
From Sikkim State Disaster Management Authority, Prof. Vinod K. Sharma, Executive Vice Chairman agreed that government is a major role player. The government is receptive to humanitarian organizations, and today there is acceptability that private agencies and non-governmental organizations have a key role we can’t do without, he affirmed.

He went on to say that it certainly is a good start although not complete. As representative from the government of Sikkim, we are open to suggestions from humanitarian agencies. However small but Sikkim can become the model state.

Role of media was brought to discussion in the post-lunch session. Amrendra Pandey from Times group explained that media has a proactive role but media also need information. “We are not experts”, he stated. There are many organizations (NGOs) who have not sufficiently provided the information we asked for. If these information do not come on time we cannot meet our deadlines.

It may be summed up that proper documentation by Humanitarian Sector can potentially reduce existing trust deficit across sectors, close fund gap and prepare a stronger pitch for advocacy, even with media.

In an interesting response from the floor, droughts and floods vis-à-vis the humanitarian responses are only half the story, because these crisis, he said are only going to increase due to climate change. When are the humanitarian agencies going to talk about it, Mr. Harjeet Singh from Action Aid wanted to know?
Similarly, Fr. Frederick D’Souza, Caritas India Executive Director also challenged his colleagues from the sector asking “Can we change,” especially when we know floods come every year, why can’t we go before the floods come and why not do things differently, reach help even before floods or disaster strikes?