Disaster Management Challenges In Underdeveloped Coastal Areas Of Pakistan

Inter-organizational coordination challenges during disasters are a well-known issue but a neglected area of research. There are only a few researches on the topic, examining the performance of information and communication systems in developed countries, where disaster systems are very well established.Pakistan is among the countries with the highest number of casualties during natural disasters. There have been huge investments in disaster mitigation measures in Pakistan. For community resilience many projects are running through financial support of Asian Development Bank and World Bank. Despite these hard efforts heavy human and economic losses are observed each year. This thesis briefly describes the details of ongoing community development and structural measurement projects in coastal areas of Sindh, and their achievements. It highlights the shortcomings in existing Pakistani disaster management policy through a newly proposed vulnerability index model ROSE (Resources, Organization, Social and Environmental uncertainty model). To include the perception and experience of the disaster affected communities and disaster responders,8focus group discussions from79various different stake holders have been carried out to ascertain the causes. The quantitative measurement of disaster management challenges has been done from regression analysis of200questionnaire collected from district government, government departments, influential people, service companies, community base organizations, non-government organizations and law enforcement agencies working in study area.To resolve the disaster management problems this thesis presented practical solution through case studies of1) Radio communication for early warning system.2) Design of resilient telecom infrastructure3) Telemedicine for health care delivery and4) NGO regulations etc. This study can be extended to other underdeveloped regions of the world to serve the calamity struck regions with fewer economic and human losses. It will also help in providing telemedicine and distance learning facilities to rural underdeveloped areas, to bridge the digital divide gap.