Study of Integrated Social Vulnerability Index SoVIint of Hilly Region of Uttarakhand, India

Abstract

The hilly regions of India have suffered many disasters, both natural and anthropogenic. In the hilly state like Uttarakhand, the hazards like flash flood, forest fires, and landslide affect the community at the large scale. These hazards cause severe physical injuries, loss of life, and at large scale property damage. To understand the impact of such natural hazards, we need to examine vulnerability of the society, so that we can define vulnerability as the status of a community to prevent, mitigate, prepare for or respond to a natural and a man-made hazard. The absence of coping strategies, which is also known as resilience, has altered the vulnerability of a community. Thus, vulnerability index of a community has to be calculated considering physical, social, economic and environmental factors associated with the community. This research paper tries to find out an integrated social vulnerability factor. The proposed integrated social vulnerability factor is determined by considering various factors, such as physical, social, economic, and environmental. All these factors increase the susceptibility of a community to the impact of hazards. Poverty, occupation, child population, literacy rate, disability, marginalization, and inequities in wealth distribution of a society or community will also change the social vulnerability. Proposed Integrated social vulnerability index for the hilly terrain of Uttarakhand incorporated local technical knowledge insight and skills, so that local people and local administration are able to identify problems and can offer a solution to resist future emergencies i.e. the proposed social vulnerability indicator will support state, local, and traditional disaster management officials to determine areas of the most sensitive populations and better mitigation operation can be performed in case of disaster.