top of page

By:

Sagari Gupta

24 March 2026 at 7:46:04 pm

The Cost of Staying Vulnerable

Nepal’s $5 billion reconstruction bill exposes a wider economic failure: when governments repeatedly restore vulnerable assets instead of investing in resilience, natural hazards become recurring fiscal shocks. Nepal needs $4 billion to $5 billion to rebuild after floods triggered by a glacier collapse killed more than 600 people in Nepal and Tibet on August 26. That bill equals nearly a tenth of the country’s economy. The bigger question is what this bill represents. $5 billion is the cost...

The Cost of Staying Vulnerable

Nepal’s $5 billion reconstruction bill exposes a wider economic failure: when governments repeatedly restore vulnerable assets instead of investing in resilience, natural hazards become recurring fiscal shocks. Nepal needs $4 billion to $5 billion to rebuild after floods triggered by a glacier collapse killed more than 600 people in Nepal and Tibet on August 26. That bill equals nearly a tenth of the country’s economy. The bigger question is what this bill represents. $5 billion is the cost of replacing assets that already existed and were expected to generate value for years - roads that connected markets, bridges that carried trade, power stations that supported industry and homes that held household wealth. Nepal will spend billions restoring what it already had, rather than investing that money in what comes next. The scale of the economic damage depends on where people live, what gets built there, how rivers are managed, whether warning systems reach households and whether people have enough savings to survive an interruption in income. Assam offers the clearest lesson in this respect. Floods this year killed at least 99 people and displaced hundreds of thousands. Researchers from India, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK and the US examined the rainfall data and found that it remained within historical norms. The floods intensified because of rapid urbanisation, deforestation, degraded wetlands and poor drainage, rather than because of a stronger monsoon. Then again, two districts can receive the same rainfall and still end up with very different losses. One may have functioning drainage, early-warning systems and insurance, while the other has none of these protections. For the second, a flood becomes an economic shock rather than simply a weather event. A farmer does not read a government estimate of aggregate losses. He or she loses a crop, still owes an agricultural loan and may go without income for weeks. A shopkeeper loses inventory, while a daily-wage worker loses earnings because there is no work. A family may have to sell a buffalo to buy food, and a child may miss school. Misleading Picture The GDP can also give a misleading picture of recovery. When a bridge collapses, rebuilding it creates construction activity as the government hires workers and purchases cement and steel, while public spending rises and GDP records that activity as growth. But the country, in fact, has spent money replacing an asset it already had. Nepal shows the scale of this trap. Its 2015 earthquake required an estimated $9 billion in reconstruction, close to half the country’s GDP at the time, according to Nepal’s Post Disaster Recovery Framework. Eleven years later, the country faces another multi-billion-dollar rebuild. A country that repeatedly reconstructs the same assets never accumulates new ones. The insurance gap shows who ultimately pays. Munich Re estimates that natural disasters caused close to $112 billion in economic losses worldwide in the first half of 2026, of which only $44 billion was insured, leaving a gap of 60 percent. Those uninsured losses simply move from one balance sheet to another. A wealthy household may lose a home but still have insurance, savings and access to credit with which to rebuild. A low-income family that loses the same physical asset may also lose its main store of wealth. The same flood therefore produces very different outcomes depending on income, making disaster risk a distributional issue as much as an environmental one. In India’s case, the problem is ‘disaster repetition.’ Assam already knows that it floods every monsoon, and that is the uncomfortable part policymakers continue to sidestep after every disaster season. The state spends heavily every year repairing the same roads, while agricultural income disappears at scale after each flood and households repeatedly borrow to recover. Public money therefore goes towards restoring assets that remain exposed to the same risks instead of redesigning them. A road that repeatedly washes away is a public-investment problem, not only a disaster-response problem. An embankment that repeatedly fails is a planning problem, while a household that falls into debt after every flood is a social-protection problem. Case for Prevention Prevention needs a stronger political case because adaptation still competes for a small share of development budgets. Nepal’s reconstruction bill, worth close to a tenth of its economy, makes that allocation harder to defend. Adaptation is infrastructure investment and fiscal planning but it is also poverty prevention. A bridge that does not collapse creates no headline, while a flood avoided through better drainage earns no minister political credit. That imbalance pushes governments towards visible responses over invisible prevention, even when prevention costs less. Not every disaster can be traced to climate change. The World Weather Attribution study on Assam rules it out directly for that event. The stronger, less comfortable conclusion is that physical hazards are colliding with development decisions: more people and more valuable assets are living in exposed areas, infrastructure is becoming more expensive and interconnected, poor households have limited savings and little insurance, and governments operate with finite fiscal space. The real cost of a disaster lies in the present and future ravages to the economy - the crop never harvested, the wages never earned, the unpaid loans and the public project that gets rebuilt instead of the next one getting built. The real test of policy is not how quickly a government announces relief but whether the same community has to again bear the brunt of the next flood. A disaster becomes a policy failure when governments keep paying for the same vulnerability instead of changing it. (The writer is an independent public policy researcher. Views personal.)

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Updated: Oct 21, 2024

Why is Mamata Seeing Ghost of Bangladesh?

Mamata is seeing a ghost of Bangladesh behind the massive outrage and waves of protest over rape and murder of the trainee doctor. And the reasons are many.

It’s been over a fortnight. Yet with each passing day the voice of protest is getting louder and stronger. From the streets of Kolkata it’s pouring into roads of hinterland. The cry for justice for a rape victim has consolidated into a wail of demands to set a lot of wrongdoings right. Here in lies the fear and trepidation. Wasn’t the issue that brought the youth of Bangladesh out on the thoroughfares a simple, innocent one of quota reform?

The chief minister of Bengal, known for understanding the pulse of people better than many, was quick to read the signages floating in the political horizon.

The most obvious reason for her to be tensed is that both the regime change in Bangladesh and the mass protest in Bengal, were student-driven to begin with. The two incidents---end of 15 year old Sheikh Hasina government and turbulence in West Bengal, over the heinous crime, falling back to back, the first on August 5th and the latter from August 9th onwards, give natural scope for comparisons. More so, because in both the cases the movement strayed beyond an affected constituency to include aggrieved people at large, cutting across socio-economic demography. If the quota reform protest started by students in Bangladesh became a mass uprising against an autocratic regime, the campaign demanding justice for the rape victim and overall safety and security of women in Mamata Banerjee’s Bengal soon snowballed into a movement of no-confidence against the government. Slogans--”Mamata must resign” also got floated in social media much in line with the call for ouster of Sheikh Hasina. In fact “Resignation of Hasina” became the single point agenda into which all other fringe demands coalesced.

Incidentally, even before people started drawing parallels, that there could be a thread of commonality in the way the upheaval in Bangladesh and Bengal played out, Mamata was quick to point out that the Opposition were trying to pull off a Bangladesh by politicizing the tragic incident: “A coordinated approach has been executed by the BJP and the CPIM with support from the Centre to defame Bengal and exploit the situation....They want to make a Bangladesh here. They are taking cues from student unrest in Bangladesh and are attempting to capture similarly. I have no longing for the chair. I came here to serve people.”

Not only Mamata, her political lieutenants are consistently equating the turmoil in Bengal with the mayhem in Bangladesh. Cabinet minister for North Bengal development Udayan Guha threatened to take stern action against those, who would be trying to exploit the situation by emulating a Bangladesh like movement. “ Even after the hospital was vandalised, the police did not open fire on anyone. The police will not allow a Bangladesh type situation. We will not allow Bengal to turn into Bangladesh, Guha thundered.

Is the government’s fear unfounded?

Apart from the similarities on ground zero, as to how and where the future course of events are heading to, there are ample reasons for Bengal to mull on-- as to what led to a Bangladesh like boiling point. To begin with, it’ll be appropriate to talk of Bangladesh and the prevailing situation, that made the students’ protest become big in magnitude. The students were out on the streets because of a high reservation in public jobs. Unemployment and stagnant job market in private sector coupled with a high rate of inflation drove the educated youth to rebel against the government.

But soon the students found enormous number of sympathisers, who were equally at the receiving end. According to Bangladesh citizens, the last two terms of the Sheikh Hasina government were a mockery of democracy. Even elections would be compromised. As Hasina grew from strength to strength, she politicized institutions. The rank and file of police owed allegiance to the ruling dispensation. Extortion, harrassment and raids by police and people in power became rampant. An atmosphere of fear and repression reigned and people got restless to overthrow the government.

Politicization of institutions has been happening in Mamata government too. Allegations are quite strong that police in Bengal functions at the beck and call of political bosses. The lapses and alleged loopholes on the part of police in handling the rape and murder of the young doctor have yet again revealed a sense of confused or misplaced loyalty.

But above everything else both Hasina and Mamata governments allegedly seem to have twined in accepting corruption as a way of life. In Bangladesh jobs of primary and secondary teachers got sold at premium, Rs 10-12 lakh in the Hasina regime. Even police had to pay up for prized postings and transfers. In Bengal busting of the teacher’s recruitment scam has revealed how unsuccessful and ineligible candidates got government jobs in schools in exchange of bribes.

Similarities are multiple and inescapable. Mamata has good reasons to be apprehensive. It’s not only she, who can see and connect the dots. People, out on the streets, clamoring for justice, can see a providential pattern somewhere in the unfolding of future events in these two places-- Bangladesh and Bengal. True, they share more than 2,217 odd km of border. They share the same umbilical cord, other than language, culture, ethos, icons. Even emotions are the same. So she cannot take any risk.

(The writer is a senior jounalist based in Kolkata. Views personal)

Comments

bottom of page