UPSC Mains 2019 GS Paper 3 Q8: model answer
Vulnerability is an essential element for defining disaster impacts and its threat to people. How and in what ways can vulnerability to disasters be characterized? Discuss different types of vulnerability with reference to disasters.
What the question wants
Explain how vulnerability to disasters can be characterised, and discuss its different types.
How to structure it
Characterising, then types.
- Vulnerability's role
- How to characterise it
- Types
- Use
How to think it through
Vulnerability: conditions that make a community susceptible to harm. Characterise via exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity (IPCC); indicators: poverty, housing quality, literacy, health, access to services, gender, age, disability, social networks; vulnerability indices and maps (e.g., Climate Vulnerability Assessment for India 2019–20 by DST). Types: physical, economic, social, environmental, institutional/political, attitudinal; examples.
Model answer
The same cyclone may destroy a thatched hut and spare a concrete house next door. The storm is the same; the vulnerability is not. That is why disaster impact depends as much on people's conditions as on the hazard.
How vulnerability can be characterised
- Exposure: who and what lies in the hazard's path.
- Sensitivity: how badly they are affected, depending on housing, health and income.
- Adaptive capacity: their ability to prepare, cope and recover, through savings, insurance, knowledge and networks.
- Measured through indicators such as poverty, literacy, housing quality, access to health care, gender, age and disability.
- Mapped through vulnerability indices, such as DST's district-level climate vulnerability assessment.
Types of vulnerability
- Physical: weak buildings, homes on floodplains or slopes.
- Economic: the poor have no savings or insurance; farm and daily-wage incomes stop.
- Social: women, children, the elderly, disabled people and marginalised castes are left out of warnings and relief.
- Environmental: degraded mangroves, forests and wetlands that no longer buffer hazards.
- Institutional: weak local governance and poor coordination.
- Attitudinal: fatalism and ignoring warnings.
Reducing vulnerability is the cheapest way to reduce disaster.
Draw: Three overlapping circles: exposure, sensitivity, low adaptive capacity.
Keywords, cases and data to drop in
exposure, sensitivity, adaptive capacity, indicators, vulnerability index, DST climate vulnerability assessment, physical, economic, social, environmental, institutional, attitudinal vulnerability.
Where most answers lose marks
- Listing types without explaining how vulnerability is characterised.
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Question text as printed in the official UPSC Civil Services (Main) question paper. The model answer is original Battle IAS work; use it to learn structure, not to memorise.
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