A high- level committee headed by Union Home Minister Amit Shah has approved an additional central assistance to 3 states which experienced natural disasters in 2018. A total of Rs 4432.10 crore has been approved for Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Odisha, according to a press release by the Ministry of Home Affairs.
For Karnataka, which experienced drought last year, Rs 1029.39 crore has been approved by the committee. Further, Rs 3338.22 crore was allocated to Odisha for the devastating cyclone Fani which hit the state in April 2019 and Rs 64.49 crore was announced for Himachal Pradesh, which saw landslides and avalanches. An amount of Rs 668 crore was released in advance from the SDRF to other disaster hit states such as Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and West Bengal, the press release announced.
“This additional assistance is over and above the funds released by the Centre to the states in the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) already placed at the disposal of the States. During 2018-19, the Centre had released Rs 9568 crore to all states and during 2019-20, till date the centre has released Rs 6104 to 24 states from SDRF,” the MHA Press release confirmed.
The committee also decided to immediately constitute and dispatch Inter Ministerial Central Teams (IMCTs) to assess the damage caused to 11 states, including Kerala, which witnessed heavy rains and floods in 2019.
Although at present the IMCT visits a disaster hit state only after receiving a memorandum for relief from the state, the committee decided that the IMCTs will henceforth visit and assess the damage in the state in the immediate aftermath of the disaster and again following relief operations to decide on the funds to be allocated.
In December 2018, Rs 3048.39 crore was announced to Kerala which witnessed the worst floods in a century that year. Although the Kerala government had sought Rs 4700 crore as compensation from the centre for the floods, the committee headed by former Home Minister Rajnath Singh had only approved Rs 3048 crore.
The central assistance was above the interim relief of Rs 600 crore that the centre had granted in the immediate aftermath of the Kerala floods.