In many developing countries, local authorities are not ready to undertake the pre-disaster activities due to primarily financial constraints. In post-disaster cases, only when they receive the international aid, they can carry out rehabilitation and reconstruction activities. Financial constraint is one of the reasons but other ones are technical and political obstacles and complexities. The politicians may not be directly interested in implementing these mitigation measures as the returns from the risk mitigation activities are not gained within the same election cycle (Martin Valdivia, 2001). Also tangible results such as those from the post-disaster activities are not evident in the pre-disaster activities – that leaves a doubt with the implementers about the success of the risk-mitigation measures. In these typical given situations, the research proposed is to attempt not only to emphasise the importance of the pre-disaster activities, but also to quantify the benefits and gains due to the implementation of the pre-disaster mitigation activities.
To understand risk faced by a community, we need to understand how vulnerable the population and the buildings are. This can be done through studying the buildings and population in detail. In more developed countries, a detailed database of the building stock is available. However, for countries like India, it is not true. So it is proposed to develop a method of rapid assessing the risk (not the damage), by understanding the building attributes and the influencing geology, soil conditions, etc.
The study proposes to explore further on the building damage data available from the 2001 Bhuj earthquake; and also collect transactional data from the communities.