Children’s Vulnerability in Coastal Slums during Cyclone: A Case Study of Puri Municipality Area

Hazards are the natural events that take place in an area locally. When this natural event causes huge devastation or destruction of live and property is called disaster. Different natural disasters occurred in different places of the world in different times. For example, flood, drought, landslide, earthquake, volcanic eruption, cyclone, tsunami, bush fire etc. are the natural events but when these natural events take the lives and property in huge numbers or amount it called as disaster. There are many vulnerable groups in context of climate change whose impacts vary spatially and temporally. It varies with location, economic status, age, sex etc. Over the last 3 decades, various extreme events like heavy rainfall, high tides, drought, floods, cyclone and tsunami have brought huge devastation to the society.
Most of the world cities are generally found in the places where the food and water facilities are found easily. So mist of the developed cities of the world developed along the river coast or ocean coast area. Hence the coastal areas are facing different types of natural hazards and disasters most of the time. The present study area, i.e. Puri urban area is a heritage city which is very ancient in nature. It is one of the four “Dhamas” of the Hindus and at the same time has beautiful golden beach affecting crowds from all around the world. Hence, plethora of employment opportunities attracted huge number of migrants. As a result there is proliferation of slum development. Basic characteristics of these slums are dilapiladated housing structures with poor ventilation, overcrowding, inadequate lighting, lack of portable water, absence of sanitation facilities, faulty alignment of streets, inundation during monsoon season, lack of access for fire-fighting and control measures.
In our society the women, children and old people are most vulnerable for every changing environment due to their lower capacity than the young people. Generally when a disease or any disaster happened, the women children and old people are affected more due to their less tolerance capacity to the changing face of the normal environment. They also don’t have access to property or financial resources which makes them more vulnerable in the face of disaster.

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