Socio economic effects of the 2013 flash floods in Uttarakhand

Abstract

The primary research question of my thesis centers around temporality and disaster. Here I use the term disaster to indicate more than a flood as the disaster of 2013 in Uttarakhand was characterized by the national media. Through my thesis I have attempted to investigate how temporality and disaster come together to affect lives. I foreground the relationship between human time and geological time in two ways, first by describing the temporality of ecological change that surpassed the human ability to cognize it, due to its rapidity, which in addition to the slow accretion of landscape-change over the years also saw actual geological change produced. Secondly the sheer devastation also meant a regular return of the past as present. This presentness of the past is precisely what describes the excess of environmental change that overwrought environmental perception. It is this present past that is at stake in describing what it means to inhabit a place of loss. newline newline newline newlineI have divided my thesis into six chapters, the first being an introduction that lays out the grounds of the disaster, my field work methodology and provides a basic structure of temporality as I see it. Chapter two deals with temporalities as they emerge from two sciences geology and hydrology, showing that in the face of a disaster that catalyses years of destruction into a few days, temporality itself refracts in a variety of ways. Chapter three deals with how delays in the compensation process creates exacerbations of trauma and depression among many of the residents of the Mandakini Valley. Chapter four focuses on the actual process of compensation, looking at two primary economies that are affected by compensation: the pilgrimage economy in the valley and the village economy. Chapter five focuses on the figure of the patwari and his hold over land administration describing the state and the social as bleeding merging categories. Finally the concluding chapter produces an account of multiple temporal forms encountered through the thesis.