Geneva: India is among top three countries after the Philippines and China where large number of people were forced to flee their homes due to disasters as 19.3 million people were displaced globally last year alone, a Norway-based global humanitarian group's report said today.
In the last seven years between 2008 to 2014, an estimated one person every second has been displaced by a disaster, according to Global Estimates 2015 People Displaced by Disasters, a report released by the Norwegian Refugee Council's Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC).
India was third after the Philippines and China, in absolute numbers last year, for displacements due to disasters both weather and hazard-related. India stood second after China, again on an absolute scale, for largest number of displacements between 2008 and 2014 globally.
The three countries were home to last year's 15 of the 20 largest displacements due to floods, storms and earthquakes. The analysis of IDMC's new report is based on research of 695 new displacement events in 100 countries.
"Middle-income countries, particularly in Asia, with fast growing urban population and fast growing economies seem to be particularly affected by disaster displacement. They account for 95 per cent of the total global displacement since 2008," said Director of IDMC, Alfredo Zamudio.
"A devastating payoff of this rapid and often unplanned urban growth is that there are more and more vulnerable people living in the path of natural hazards. The large and growing informal settlements around cities such as Mexico city, Mumbai, Karachi and Port-au-Prince are just a few examples.
"What these trends suggest, therefore, is that as well as being an acute humanitarian concern, disaster displacement is also a chronic development issue," Zamudio said.
Among last year's 20 largest displacement events which shoved people off their lands was the Philippines' typhoon Rammasun which displaced 2,994,100 people. It was followed by the same country's typhoon Hagupit.
India followed with the third largest displacement event globally as the Odisha floods displaced 1,073,700 people, according to the report. Cyclone Hudhud that hit India's Eastern coast including Odisha and Andhra Pradesh displacing 639,300 people and the Assam-Meghalaya floods between September and October that displaced 367,000 people last year, also figure among the top 20 global displacement events of last year.
The report, however, states that relative to the population size, the scale of displacement in China and India is less significant than in the Philippines. In India, between 2008 and 2014, 82.6 per cent, or 24.4 million people, were displaced by floods, followed by 17 per cent displacement (Five million people) due to storms, 0.4 per
cent displaced (132,600 people) due to earthquakes and 0.1 per cent due to wet mass movement.
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