A report on the use of agricultural credit for poor disaster victims in India

One essential response to disasters is to bring relief aid for the immediate survival of the victims. Another response is often of great importance, although it receives less publicity: that of helping the victims to re-establish themselves economically. The extension of agricultural credit is one means of achieving this where people have lost crops and/or productive assets. In Orissa, East India, from the mid-1970's, OXFAM channelled funds through local development organizations for this purpose. In this report, Lincoln Young presents a retrospective review of some of the results of two such projects; the Winter Wheat Project following a drought and the Dalua Project following floods. The emergency nature of such schemes poses considerable problems, placing unusual stress on local administrators in making rapid day-to-day decisions and diminishing the possibilities of monitoring which exist in more normal circumstances. The projects described here failed to achieve their original objectives, but lessons may be learned with perhaps greater clarity than from other, somewhat more successful, disaster relief programmes

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