Flood-induced economic loss and damage to the textile industry in Surat City, India

Indian coastal cities are susceptible to climate-induced rapid and slow-onset disasters, like cyclonic storms, floods and sea-level rise, all while existing urbanization challenges amplify vulnerability. Enhancing a city’s resilience capacity is, therefore, a pertinent issue for policymakers when there are plans to redevelop several of India’s cities into "climate-smart" cities – this needs a comprehensive city-wide loss and damage assessment. For empirical purposes, this study attempts a flood-related loss and damage assessment of Surat City in western India. Surat is an industrial hub for both the textile and diamond industries. Interviews with workers from 145 textile-weaving businesses were completed, including focus group discussions and shared learning dialogues. 

This study reaches five conclusions: 
• All the sample businesses were severely affected by floods in 2006, and on an average, each unit required 49 days to return to normal.
• Most of the labourers out-migrated following the flood, and hence, a shortage of labour was reported as a major issue.
• The mean loss and damage for each unit was approximately INR 1.51 million, where INR 0.98 million was towards direct losses, INR 1 million was towards indirect losses and compensation accounted for INR 0.47 million (at 2013 prices). This reinforces the need for indirect losses to be factored into a disaster’s impact cost assessment.
• All of the surveyed businesses are unable to access insurance as insurers are reluctant to provide cover for businesses located in risk-prone areas.
• The textile-weaving businesses’ risk perception about potential impacts of future floods is moderate, which may lead to a lack of investment in planned adaptation measures.

Available at:

http://pubs.iied.org/10749IIED.html