Few countries in the world can match Nepal's unique topography, or its sensitive geostrategic location between the two fastest growing big economies and rising superpowers on world stage. This geographical uniqueness makes the country an enviable tourist attraction, as it boasts of sunny, sub-tropical climate of Pokhara and Chitwan down in the plains, to the snowy alpine climate found in some of the highest mountains in the world. But such a rich geographical diversity also makes the country vulnerable to many natural disasters, from devastating floods and landslides every monsoon to calamitous earthquakes once a generation. This is why we need an autonomous government body to handle natural disasters. Even now, there are clearly defined ground rules for swift emergency response. But at times of crises these mechanisms seldom work, as we are painfully finding out. Otherwise, our state mechanisms would not have been so badly crippled by the Great Earthquake. For the first two weeks after the April 25 earthquake the government didn't seem to know how to respond. This would not have happened if we had an autonomous body to deal with such emergencies.Since Nepal will soon be federated, the time is right to think about an autonomous agency like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in the US. America, like Nepal, is a country in perpetual emergency mode: California occupies one of the most seismically active regions in the world; the hot climes of Arizona and New Mexico offer perfect conditions for wildfires; coastal Louisiana and Florida are routinely ravaged by hurricanes. The federal government realized that it would be impossible to overlook such a disaster-prone country without a specially-designated central agency. We hope that there has been similar realization among our policymakers. In the aftermath of the Great Earthquake, perhaps the only functioning government bodies were the security agencies: Nepal Army, Nepal Police and the Armed Police Force. But unsurprisingly their selfless efforts were not enough to handle a crisis of such magnitude. It didn't help that they had no clear guidance from political leadership and there was no single agency that could mobilize them and coordinate their post-earthquake response.
This is the right time to do it. The government is reportedly mulling a separate authority to oversee long-term rehabilitation and reconstruction. But why not, while it is at it, also take the initiative for an autonomous body to deal with national emergencies? There are clear advantages to having agencies like FEMA. In the US, it serves as the single-point of accountability for emergency preparedness and mitigation and response activities. While we are busy delineating new federal states, it would be worthwhile to establish a similar federal emergency-responder. More than anything else, the leadership of such an organization can be held to account and so there will be greater incentive to do their work properly. What we got to witness after the Great Earthquake was an expression of complete helplessness from the political leadership. This said a lot about the leadership of Sushil Koirala. But it said as much about our across-the-board failure to prepare for an earthquake that everyone knew was coming.
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