Resilience from Below: PRIs, Civil Society and the Way Forward

Disaster resilience is the capacity of a system, community or society exposed to hazards to adapt, by resisting or changing, so as to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functioning. That is the Hyogo Framework's classic definition, and its quiet revolution is the word community: resilience is not built in national capitals, it is built in villages, wards and neighbourhoods, by the people who will face the hazard first.

This article looks at resilience from below: the constitutional role of Panchayati Raj Institutions as first responders, the quiet army of civil society organisations and self-help groups, the Aapda Mitra volunteers, the early-warning technology from SACHET to the Damini app, and the issues India must fix to become a resilient nation. UPSC asked directly about resilience in its 2024 GS-3 paper, and the theme now anchors the subject.

What disaster resilience means and how it is determined

Resilience shifts the question from how quickly relief arrives to how little relief is needed. A resilient community anticipates the hazard, absorbs the shock, adapts its functioning and recovers without losing its development gains. Determination, how resilience is measured, works on four tracks. Quantitative assessments use indicators such as the Disaster Resilience Index (DRI) and the Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities (BRIC), which score communities on social, economic, infrastructural and institutional capital. Qualitative evaluations track the continuous sharing of knowledge, experience and innovation between communities, governments and international organisations. Risk mapping identifies hazards and assesses the vulnerability of communities, infrastructure and ecosystems. Capacity analysis tests response mechanisms: the availability of ambulances, rescue teams, evacuation plans and medical facilities decides how well a community reacts when the hazard strikes.

The framework itself has eight elements, each with an Indian illustration:

Panchayati Raj Institutions: the constitutional first responders

The Disaster Management Plan of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj (DMP-MoPR), prepared under Section 37 of the Disaster Management Act and NDMA guidelines, anchors community-based planning from the village to the district panchayat. The constitutional backing is explicit: the 73rd Amendment, through Article 243G, empowers PRIs to prepare plans and implement schemes for disaster management, and the Eleventh Schedule lists relief work and maintenance of community assets among PRI functions. The NDMA's 2016 guidelines on PRIs insist that no disaster plan is complete without the panchayat in it.

PRIs perform seven distinct roles in the disaster cycle:

The constraints are equally well documented: limited resources in institutional, financial and human capacity; low devolution, since states often withhold the powers and functions PRIs are constitutionally owed; unclear roles in disaster statutes; low participation of vulnerable groups at the grassroots; poor inter-agency coordination; and inadequate training of elected representatives in disaster management.

The fix list is practical: regular capacity building through NDMA and NIRDPR training modules; integration of PRI-level plans with district and state plans; earmarked funds from the SDRF and Finance Commission grants for village-level preparedness; technology enablement with mobile apps, GIS tools and early-warning dissemination; convergence of risk reduction with MGNREGA, PMAY-G, the Jal Jeevan Mission and the National Rural Livelihoods Mission; and partnership with SHGs and civil society for last-mile delivery.

Civil society and self-help groups: the quiet army

Civil society organisations are non-state, non-profit, voluntary groups formed in the social sphere, distinct from government and market: NGOs, community groups and advocacy organisations. In disasters they are usually the first to arrive and the last to leave, because they live where the disaster happens. Their most systematic Indian expression is the self-help group (SHG) movement, and SHGs perform six disaster functions:

Their limitations need honest naming: most CSO effort concentrates on post-disaster relief rather than mitigation and resilience building; limited financial capacity constrains large-scale response; volunteer shortages persist; coordination failures cause duplicated effort; and integration gaps with government and market actors reduce effectiveness.

The way forward is institutional: formally integrate CSO roles into the disaster management framework instead of treating them as ad-hoc helpers; recognise and support their social contribution; expand their role into collective stakeholder discussions, regular community resilience interactions and inputs to integrated disaster action plans, the direction the Sendai Framework itself prescribes for local participation.

Aapda Mitra: volunteers before the sirens

Aapda Mitra, meaning friends in disaster, is the NDMA's community-volunteer scheme that trains residents of disaster-prone districts in first response: search and rescue basics, first aid, evacuation support and coordination with official agencies. The premise is geographic: in the first golden hours of a flood, earthquake or cyclone, neighbours reach victims long before the NDRF or SDRF can, so training neighbours is the highest-return investment in the response chain.

The scheme embodies the larger doctrine that community participation is the cornerstone of effective disaster management: trained volunteers multiply state capacity at negligible cost, carry local knowledge of terrain and vulnerable households, and sustain preparedness between disasters through drills and awareness. Its natural partners are PRIs, which provide the institutional home, and SHGs, which provide the social network.

Early warning technology: from SACHET to Damini

India's early-warning stack is now among the most layered in the developing world. At its centre is SACHET (System for Advanced Communication and Holistic Emergency Transmission), the NDMA's Integrated Alert System developed by the Centre for Development of Telematics. Built on the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) recommended by the International Telecommunication Union, SACHET sends geo-targeted SMS alerts during disasters and is operational across all 36 states and Union Territories, putting warnings directly into the phones of people in the hazard zone.

The response end is unified by ERSS-112, the single national emergency number for disaster and other emergencies, so a citizen in crisis dials one number anywhere in the country. The citizen-information end runs through mobile apps: Damini for lightning alerts, Mausam for weather forecasts, and Meghdoot for agro-meteorological advisories to farmers. Behind them sits the India Meteorological Department's observation grid: INSAT-3D, INSAT-3DR and SCATSAT satellites, Doppler Weather Radars and Automatic Weather Stations, extended to the coasts by the National Cyclone Risk Mitigation Project's early-warning systems.

Risk knowledge, the layer beneath warning, is increasingly digital. The Web-DCRA (Web-based Dynamic Composite Risk Atlas and Decision Support System) supports cyclone risk assessment and response planning; the National Remote Sensing Centre prepares flood-hazard atlases and maintains a database of 28,000 glacial lakes in the Indian Himalayan Region for GLOF monitoring; and the Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council's Vulnerability Atlas guides disaster-resilient infrastructure planning. Capacity building rides on the IUINDRR, the network of over 330 universities and institutions under the National Institute of Disaster Management that promotes disaster education and research.

Disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction

Disasters discriminate, and persons with disabilities face measurably higher risk. Mobility impairments turn staircases into traps during evacuation, hearing impairments make siren-only warnings useless, visual impairments make unfamiliar relief camps disorienting, and the loss of assistive devices in a flood or earthquake can disable a person more completely than the hazard itself. Disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction is the deliberate redesign of the disaster cycle so that persons with disabilities are participants in planning rather than afterthoughts in relief.

Inclusion has three practical fronts. Accessible early warning means multi-format alerts: sirens paired with visual signals and vibrating alerts, messages in sign language and easy-to-read formats, and targeted outreach through disability organisations so that warnings reach people who cannot hear, see or read a standard bulletin. Accessible evacuation means transport that accommodates wheelchairs, buddy systems pairing disabled residents with trained volunteers, and evacuation routes audited for steps, narrow passages and obstacles. Accessible shelters means ramps, accessible toilets, adequate lighting, and space for assistive devices and caregivers, because a shelter a disabled person cannot enter is not a shelter. National guidance on disaster management increasingly requires plans to address these needs explicitly, and the mains-ready argument is ethical as well as practical: resilience that excludes a sixth of humanity is not resilience.

Safe schools and hospitals

Two kinds of buildings must not fail in a disaster: the ones full of children and the ones full of patients. Safe schools combine structural safety, earthquake-resistant construction and retrofitting of existing buildings, with non-structural measures such as securing furniture and equipment, and with preparedness: school disaster management plans, regular evacuation drills, and curricula that teach children what to do when the ground shakes or waters rise. A school that drills is a community asset; a school that collapses is a double tragedy, killing children and destroying the building most suited to serve as a relief shelter.

Safe hospitals follow the same logic at higher stakes. The global Safe Hospitals initiative, promoted through the health emergency and disaster risk management framework, argues that health facilities must remain functional during and after disasters, which demands structural resilience plus non-structural protection: anchoring equipment, protecting lifeline systems of power, water, oxygen and communications, and training staff in the Hospital Incident Command System, the hospital's internal command structure for emergencies. India's hospital safety assessments have repeatedly found critical equipment unanchored and backup systems untested, which is why hospital safety audits are now part of the preparedness conversation. For mains, safe schools and hospitals are the sharpest illustration of the shift from response to risk reduction: the cheapest life saved is the one never endangered by a collapsing building.

Culture, reconstruction and relocation

Disasters also destroy memory. Heritage structures, temples, historic town cores and cultural landscapes concentrate centuries of identity in buildings that were never designed for earthquakes or floods, and their loss impoverishes recovery even when lives are saved. Cultural heritage disaster risk reduction means documenting heritage assets before disaster strikes, assessing their structural vulnerabilities, retrofitting with compatible techniques, and writing heritage-specific response plans so that post-disaster debris clearance does not become heritage destruction. Reconstruction that restores a town's historic character heals faster than reconstruction that erases it, because identity is part of resilience.

How houses are rebuilt matters as much as how fast. Owner-driven reconstruction gives affected families financial assistance and technical guidance to rebuild their own homes, rather than handing the job to contractors. It is preferred because owners build to their needs and livelihoods, use local materials and labour, stay engaged rather than displaced, and the approach costs less per house while building local construction skills. Contractor-driven reconstruction, by contrast, often delivers uniform houses in distant layouts that beneficiaries abandon. The policy lesson, visible from Gujarat's earthquake reconstruction onward, is that people rebuild better when they are treated as partners rather than recipients.

Sometimes rebuilding in place is the wrong answer. Post-disaster relocation moves communities away from land that has become uninhabitable, through repeated flooding, landslide risk, coastal erosion or subsidence. Relocation is the hardest option because it severs livelihoods tied to place, fishing grounds, farms, forests, and dissolves social networks, which is why involuntary relocation so often fails and why successful cases share features: genuine community consent, land and livelihood restoration at the new site, and transparent timelines. For mains, relocation is the honest edge of adaptation: retreat is sometimes the only resilient choice, but only consent and livelihoods make it work.

Issues in India's disaster management and the way forward

India's framework has travelled from relief-centrism to a technology-driven, risk-informed model, but five issues persist. Financing is improving, the 15th Finance Commission allocated Rs 2.28 lakh crore for 2021-26 across preparedness, mitigation, response and reconstruction, yet district and village-level absorption remains weak. Enforcement lags behind lawmaking, visible in missing fire NOCs, absent dam emergency plans and advisory-only crowd guidelines. Last-mile delivery of warnings still depends on human chains that break under pressure. Urbanisation concentrates risk faster than cities build resilience, in flooding, fire and heat. And data systems, from disaster databases to loss accounting, are still being built under the DM (Amendment) Act, 2025, which added Urban Disaster Management Authorities, empowered State Disaster Response Forces, mandated a national disaster database and gave the National Crisis Management Committee statutory status.

The way forward converges on five moves. Localise plans and money: integrate village and ward plans with district plans and earmark SDRF funds for preparedness, not just relief. Converge schemes: route MGNREGA, housing, water and livelihood missions toward resilience infrastructure such as cyclone shelters, drainage and check dams. Enforce standards: make crowd, fire and dam-safety guidelines legally binding with penalties. Deepen technology: extend CAP-based alerts, AI-assisted forecasting and real-time sensor networks to every hazard. Institutionalise community: give PRIs, Aapda Mitra volunteers and SHGs statutory roles and training budgets, because the evidence from Amphan to Fani to Kerala is consistent: where communities were prepared, fewer people died.

The last mile: how a warning becomes a saved life

Every early warning travels the same chain, and it breaks at its weakest link. Scientific agencies such as IMD, the Central Water Commission and INCOIS detect the hazard; national platforms built on the Common Alerting Protocol carry the alert to states; district administrations convert it into evacuation and sheltering orders; and Panchayati Raj Institutions, Aapda Mitra volunteers and community groups carry it door to door. The chain is only as strong as its last mile, which is why mock drills matter: a village that has rehearsed its cyclone-shelter route in fair weather executes it in foul weather without waiting for instructions.

The Ahmedabad experience generalises the lesson beyond coasts. Community-level heat preparedness, built on early warnings, cooling spaces and changed work hours, saved an estimated 1,100 lives in its first years and was replicated across more than 23 Indian cities and states. Resilience, in other words, is produced locally or not at all.

UPSC and this topic: PYQ weightage

• 2024 (GS-3, 15 marks): What is disaster resilience? How is it determined? Describe various elements of a resilience framework. Also mention the global targets of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030). This single question maps one-to-one onto this article: definition, DRI and BRIC determination, the eight framework elements, and Sendai's seven global targets.
• 2019 (GS-3, 10 marks): Vulnerability is an essential element for defining disaster impacts and its threat to people. Discuss different types of vulnerability with reference to disasters. Use it to enrich the risk-mapping and vulnerability discussion in any resilience answer.
• 2018 (GS-3, 15 marks): Describe various measures taken in India for Disaster Risk Reduction before and after signing the Sendai Framework. How is this framework different from the Hyogo Framework for Action, 2005? The Indian-efforts half of this answer draws on Aapda Mitra, SACHET, CDRI and the 2025 Amendment.
• 2015 (GS-3, 15 marks): Disaster preparedness is the first step in any disaster management process. Explain how hazard zonation mapping will help in disaster mitigation in the case of landslides. An early signal that UPSC rewards the preparedness and mapping half of resilience.
• 2013 (GS-3, 10 marks): How important are vulnerability and risk assessment for pre-disaster management? The founding question of the theme, still quotable as an administrator's perspective.

Key Terms

• Disaster Management Plan of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj: The Disaster Management Plan of the Ministry of Panchayati Raj is the ministry's plan under Section 37 of the DM Act for mainstreaming disaster management into panchayat functioning. Example: the plan tasks panchayats with village-level preparedness and volunteer training
• Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council: The Building Materials and Technology Promotion Council, under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, promotes disaster-resistant construction technologies and building materials. Example: BMTPC's guidelines promote earthquake-resistant housing designs
• Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities: Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities is a framework for measuring a community's starting resilience across social, economic, institutional and infrastructural dimensions, so progress can be tracked. Example: BRIC-style baselines let a district measure whether its resilience is improving year on year

• Cultural heritage disaster risk reduction: Cultural heritage disaster risk reduction protects heritage structures and historic town cores through pre-disaster documentation, vulnerability assessment, compatible retrofitting and heritage-sensitive response plans. Example: Documenting a historic temple complex before an earthquake ensures restoration follows records rather than guesswork.

• Centre for Development of Telematics: The Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) is an autonomous telecom R&D body set up by the Government of India in 1984. Tasked with building indigenous digital switching and telecom technology, it developed India's own rural telephone exchanges, reducing dependence on imported equipment and extending connectivity to villages. It matters for UPSC for science-tech and governance questions on indigenous innovation and digital infrastructure.

• Disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction: Disability-inclusive disaster risk reduction is the deliberate redesign of the disaster cycle so that persons with disabilities, who face higher risk from mobility, sensory and communication barriers, are participants in planning rather than afterthoughts in relief. Example: National guidance increasingly requires disaster plans to address accessible warning, evacuation and shelter explicitly.

• National Remote Sensing Centre: The National Remote Sensing Centre, Hyderabad, is ISRO's centre for remote sensing data and applications, supporting disaster monitoring, damage assessment and hazard mapping. Example: NRSC's satellite imagery mapped the 2023 Sikkim GLOF damage
• DM (Amendment) Act, 2025: The DM (Amendment) Act, 2025 is the short name for the Disaster Management (Amendment) Act, 2025, which received assent on 29 March 2025 and came into force on 9 April 2025. It gave statutory status to the NCMC and HLC, mandated disaster databases and created Urban Disaster Management Authorities. Example: UDMAs in million-plus cities derive their authority from this Act

• Safe hospitals and HICS: Safe hospitals are health facilities designed and managed to remain functional during and after disasters, through structural resilience, anchored equipment, protected lifeline systems of power, water, oxygen and communications, and staff trained in the Hospital Incident Command System, the hospital's internal emergency command structure. Example: Anchoring critical equipment prevents a functional hospital from becoming non-functional in an earthquake.

• India Meteorological Department: The India Meteorological Department, founded in 1875, is India's national weather service under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, responsible for forecasts, cyclone warnings and climate records. Example: IMD's cyclone track forecasts anchor Odisha's evacuation decisions
• Panchayati Raj Institutions: Panchayati Raj Institutions are the constitutionally mandated rural local governments (village, block and district panchayats) under the 73rd Amendment. They are the first responders and implementers of disaster management at the grassroots. Example: panchayats prepare village disaster management plans and maintain volunteer teams
• Automatic Weather Stations: Automatic Weather Stations are unmanned stations that continuously record temperature, rainfall, wind and humidity, feeding forecast models. Example: AWS data powers hyperlocal weather alerts

Practice questions