Heavy rain warning, or a tank about to breach

Flood duty is the revenue department at its most elemental: warnings, bunds, boats, camps, and then the long arithmetic of loss. The legal frame is the Disaster Management Act 2005 — NDMA under the Prime Minister (s. 3), SDMA under the Chief Minister (s. 14), and the District Disaster Management Authority under the Collector (s. 25), whose directions during the event run through the RDO–Tahsildar line. But the first hours are won or lost on older instincts: know your tanks, move people early, write everything down.

The first sixty minutes

1. Acknowledge the warning and open the log — you, wherever you are. IMD warnings and reservoir releases reach the district through the Collectorate’s control room (the DDMA’s operational face; flood-season control rooms run round the clock as standing practice). Note the time you received it and from whom. Every subsequent decision will be timed against this entry.
2. Activate your own control chain — the Tahsildar for a mandal, the RDO for the division. Staff recall, vehicle check, contact list of GPOs/RIs village-wise, and the rain-gauge and tank-level reporting schedule tightened from daily to hourly for the red-flagged catchments. The DDMA’s plan (the district disaster management plan) lists the vulnerable villages and low-lying habitations — pull that list now, not from memory.
3. Put eyes on the tanks — the Irrigation section officer, with your RI. For each tank taking inflow: water level against FTL, condition of the gattu (any seepage, boils, rain-cuts), whether the tumu and surplus weir are functioning or choked. The Irrigation Department is the custodian of the tank; the revenue officer’s job is to make sure someone from it is physically at the vulnerable bunds and reporting. A tank overtopping its gattu is a breach in progress — the report you want is from the bund, not the office.
4. Pre-position the breach response — the Tahsildar, with Irrigation and the local sarpanch. Sandbags, tractors, casuarina/ballast if the Irrigation officer asks, and labour mustered on the spot. Cutting a controlled escape or easing the surplus weir is Irrigation’s technical call; your role is people, materials and the record of who decided what.
5. Order evacuation where the risk is live — the Collector/DDMA’s authority, exercised through you. The DM Act’s district machinery carries the power to direct evacuation and requisition resources during a threatening disaster situation; in the field this is the Tahsildar and police moving the downstream habitations, low-lying colonies and shikam-edge dwellings — earliest, the people who will not leave without persuasion. Record the order, the villages, the time. Persuasion first, but do not let a refusal stand between a family and a breach: note refusals with witnesses.
6. Open the relief camps — the Tahsildar, with the MPDO and the school/community-hall keepers. Camp opening is standing drill: shelter, drinking water, food, lighting, medical attendance (DM&HO’s team), and a camp register from the first arrival — name, village, family members, time in. The register is both welfare and, later, the enumeration’s first list.
7. Tell the district — continuously. Situation reports to the Collectorate control room at the rhythm it prescribes; anything that has actually breached, drowned or collapsed is a phone call now and a written vardi within the hour.

The first twenty-four hours

Once the water crests, the work splits into rescue-and-relief and record-and-relief.

Rescue and immediate relief. Marooned habitations get boats (fire services, police, and the swimmers every village headman can name); the camps get their second meal on time — the failure the news cameras find first; drinking-water sources that submerged are chlorinated before people return to them (DM&HO/RWS). Gratuitous relief in kind — food, essentials — moves per current norms without waiting for enumeration.

Enumeration begins the moment water recedes — and it is the revenue craft the whole relief edifice stands on. Teams of revenue, agriculture/horticulture and engineering staff walk the affected villages recording, survey-number-wise and house-wise: crop area inundated (the pahani says what stood there; the azmoish tradition is exactly this discipline), houses damaged by category (fully/severely/partially — per the format in force), cattle lost, and human lives lost. Every death gets the full unnatural-death treatment — inquest, post-mortem where required — because ex-gratia for loss of life is paid against that record.

The ex-gratia and assistance flow, in outline: enumerated loss is verified (RI and Tahsildar tier), consolidated at the division, and sanctioned and paid per the current SDRF/state norms in force — rates per hectare, per house category, per animal, and ex-gratia for deaths are norms notified by government, revised from time to time, and must be taken from the operative instructions at the time of the event, not from memory or last year’s file. Payment is by DBT against the verified lists. The CMRF (Chief Minister’s Relief Fund) runs as a separate, application-based channel for cases the norms miss — the Collectorate’s H section handles it, on the Collector’s recommendation.

The breach postscript. If a tank did breach, the same day: photographs of the breach section, the Irrigation officer’s preliminary report, the timeline of levels and decisions from your log, and a panchanama of downstream damage. Breaches produce enquiries; the officer whose log shows hourly readings and timed decisions has nothing to fear from one.

Cover yourself — the record

By tonight there must exist, on paper:

• The control-room log: warning received, each report from the bunds, each decision with time.
• The evacuation record: order, villages covered, refusals witnessed.
• The camp registers, opened from the first arrival and totalled daily.
• Vardis upward for every breach, death and collapse — phoned, then written.
• The enumeration teams order (who, which villages, which format) even if the walking starts tomorrow.
• Photographs: tanks at peak, breach sections, submerged habitations — dated.
• Requisitions of boats, vehicles, materials and buildings in writing, however they were first made.

Legal hooks

• Disaster Management Act, 2005 — s. 25 DDMA chaired by the Collector; the district plan; the Act’s direction and requisition powers during a disaster; penal provisions (s. 51 onwards) for obstruction and false claims.
• SDRF/NDRF framework — relief paid at notified norm rates against enumerated loss; the state’s memorandum for central assistance rides on the district damage reports.
• BNSS ss. 194–196 — inquest and inquiry machinery for flood deaths.
• CMRF — the discretionary assistance channel through the Collectorate, per its standing procedure.

Who to call

• The Collectorate control room / DDMA — the spine; everything reports here.
• The Irrigation (Minor Irrigation) section officer and EE — tank custodians; technical calls on bunds and weirs.
• The SHO and fire station — rescue, evacuation muscle, boats.
• The MPDO — camps, NREGS machinery for restoration works.
• The DM&HO’s field team — camp health, chlorination, post-flood epidemic watch.
• The DPO/panchayat secretaries and GPOs — the village-level eyes the whole system runs on.
• The RWS and Panchayat Raj engineers — drinking water and road/culvert damage assessment.

Mistakes that end careers

• Evacuating late. The single unforgivable flood error. Ordering evacuation that proves unnecessary costs a day’s disruption; not ordering one that proves necessary costs lives and the officer. The asymmetry is total — act on it.
• The unmanned bund. A tank that breached while its hourly reports were being invented from the office is a breach with a named owner. Physical presence, or an honest report that presence was impossible.
• Feeding the camp badly. Relief camps are the most photographed square metres in the district. Food, water, lights, latrines — checked personally, twice a day.
• Sloppy enumeration. Inflated lists surface in audit; deflated ones surface in agitation; unsigned ones surface in both. Loss recorded at the spot, signed by the team, read in the village — the gram sabha reading of draft lists is the standing safeguard.
• Quoting relief amounts from memory. Norms change. The officer who announces last year’s rate at a camp has manufactured a grievance for every payee. “As per current norms, after verification” — always.
• Requisitioning without paper. Boats, JCBs and private buildings taken over verbally become bills nobody sanctions and disputes nobody ends. Requisition in writing, even if the writing follows the act by an hour.

Questions you’ll actually get

“The tank looks fine but the Irrigation officer wants to cut the gattu to ease pressure — do I permit it?” The technical decision is his department’s, and the downstream consequence is your problem — so get both on paper: his written recommendation with reasons, your recorded concurrence, downstream villages warned and the vulnerable stretch evacuated before the cut. A controlled cut with a record is engineering; one without is negligence litigation.

“People are refusing to leave their cattle and come to the camp.” Move the cattle problem, not just the people: identify the raised ground or cattle shelter, muster fodder through the panchayat, and let families see the animals are provided for. Where refusal persists against a live breach risk, record it before witnesses and keep the rescue option physically close. Force is the very last resort and almost never the answer to a cattle problem — persuasion through the sarpanch and elders is.

“A family says their house collapsed last week in the earlier rain — do they go on this enumeration?” The enumeration records damage from the notified event; earlier damage goes through the ordinary channels, not smuggled into this list — one wrong inclusion, found in verification, taints the whole village’s list. Take their application separately, verify it separately, and say so to them plainly.

“When will the ex-gratia come? The camp is asking.” Give the process, not a date you don’t control: enumeration signed, verification by the Tahsildar’s tier, sanction per current norms, DBT to the listed account. What you can promise is your own step — lists finalised and sent by a stated day — and that promise you keep.