Many Departments working over the issue of water, irrigation and floods have changed their names in the recent past. thus, department of Irrigation has now become Water Resources department (WRd), Flood Control’s new incarnation is Flood management and Relief and Rehabilitation department has graduated into disaster management department (dmd) and so on. By changing names it appears that a sea change has occurred in the working of these institutions for the better. But let someone ask what changes have actually occurred, the answer is hard to find. Most of these departments are doing the same thing even now; the flood control people are on an embankment building spree as earlier and the dmds of the states are still busy in relief operations under a new label. If a change could be brought by just changing one’s name, there was no need to do anything else, just change the name. this is true for most of the issues affecting human life but it is truer when floods are expected to be mitigated by calling it a disaster.

Disaster is defined as a great or sudden misfortune. Various governmental and nongovernmental organizations try to combat disaster by preparing to face it, mitigate it and rehabilitate the people to pre-disaster situation. All the three steps put together are called disaster management. Floods are said to be a natural disaster by many while a significant section of the society has started calling them manmade disaster because human intervention has aggravated the problem of flooding. the debate is fierce and continuing. The floods in Nagpur, Nasik, Bhopal, Hoshangabad, Barmer, Jaipur, Banda, Bangalore and Jallundhar in the recent memory are a disaster but the Bihar floods of 1998, 2002, 2004, 2007 or even the 2008 floods in the Kosi basin cannot be rated as a disaster.