Indigenous Knowledge Management and Humanitarian Supply Chain for Disaster Mitigation and Sustainable Development in the Eco Communities of India

Abstract

The shift in focus from hazards to underlying vulnerabilities has provided disaster managers with a richer understanding of the factors that erode the coping capacities of communities and social systems. Ecological environment plays a role in many of these factors. Also, since we realize that there is a strong causal relationship between poverty, a degraded environment, knowledge vulnerabilities and higher disaster risk, it would be desirable to combine modern knowledge and indigenous knowledge in disaster preparedness and mitigation with the goal of building community capacity in a participatory, sustainable and cost-effective manner. The present study thus aims to encourage all stakeholders, in particular, the policymakers to incorporate a diverse range of indigenous knowledge repository in their disaster management and sustainable development initiatives for the country. It endeavors to present ideas such as the utility of promoting a global scale and commonly shared digital platform for dissemination and enrichment of Indigenous knowledge and practices across eco-communities of India and abroad based on a fully developed and functional web-portal branded – A.A.D.I.GYAN Augmenting Action For Disaster Management through Indigenous Knowledge (www.aadigyanproject.in). This portal has been designed and developed by a project-team as a part of digital knowledge management initiatives for documenting, preserving and promoting the role of Indigenous knowledge in mitigating natural and man-made disasters, particularly prevailing in the Eco-communities. It carries an extensive database covering five states of India and respective hub-locations with a scope to expand at global scale, containing data and information about diverse set of indigenous activities. Complementing the above initiative, Humanitarian Supply Chain (HSC), on the other hand, is central to any developmental initiative meant for capacity building in the eco-communities of India, particularly for those which are located in disaster prone regions. Although being environmentally rich, such class of rural or tribal eco-communities and their people are often devoid of supplies of adequate Physical, Social, Economic, and Technological resources and are forced to struggle on a daily basis to survive and are unable to cope with any additional stress factors like population growth and abject poverty. In this regard, sustainable humanitarian supply chain practice and community based resource management can collectively promote more resilient communities promoting social, economic and environmental equity and ethical imperatives for sustainable community development. Apart from providing immediate relief assistance at the occurrence of natural disasters, what is Indigenous Knowledge Management and Humanitarian Supply Chain for Disaster Mitigation and Sustainable Development in the Eco Communities of India: Holistic Systems Modeling Approach, Handbook of Research on Modeling, Analysis, and Control of Complex Systems, IGI Global Plc., USA, 2021 2 more critical is their long term capacity building with a holistic perspective. This is also vital to enhance the effectiveness and speed of community response to major humanitarian programs, such as health, food, shelter, water, sanitation and employment. Therefore, in the second section of the present paper, an attempt has also been made to develop a system dynamics model of humanitarian supply chain in order to capture causal dynamics and inter linkages within the system under investigation and suggest some critical intervention strategies for enhancing overall performance. In this study, an economic subsector base model for the Indian tribal communities has been calibrated and used for simulation analysis as a reference case-study. The key motivation to select tribal regions for our model was that the various humanitarian measures undertaken under India EcoDevelopment Project (IEP) by the Indian government are not able to meet the intended objectives