Grassroot Internet Initiatives Lead the Way After Cyclone Amphan

In mid-May, cyclone Amphan struck the lands stretching across the Bay of Bengal, causing devastation in Bangladesh and the nearby Indian states of Odisha and West Bengal. Nature’s fury swallowed over a hundred human lives, and caused over $13 billion in losses – reportedly the highest cost ever incurred in the history of cyclones in the northern Indian Ocean.

Gradually, however, the countries of South Asia are better preparing themselves for each next cyclone. In one of my 2019 articles for The Diplomat I covered how the state of Odisha handled cyclone Fani. The losses from Fani and Amphan are still tremendous and tragic, but they are nowhere comparable to the effects of the 1999 “super cyclone,” after which casualties in Odisha were counted in the thousands. Here I will focus on a very narrow but interesting subject: How grassroot initiatives by private citizens, realized through the internet, sought to facilitate the process of recovering from the latest cyclone.

There are a number of ways in which the internet and the technologies connected to it are useful for national and international institutions in tracing cyclones, preparing for them, sending warnings to people, and raising awareness of the threat. The internet can obviously also be very useful for the prompt collection of funds for relief activities, either by private charities or state institutions. Private citizens – those that do not normally work for institutions dealing with calamities – can also chip in on their own, devoting not only their money but also time to jointly collect valuable information. The recent cyclone Amphan sparked such efforts by private citizens online – netizens to the rescue.

Perfect Storm, Perfect Strangers (on the Web)

One initiative, led by Siddharth Agarwal, sought to promptly collect information on relief work – on institutions, such as charities, that distributed needed material in the days that immediately followed the cyclone’s landfall. Netizens picked a district in West Bengal and tried to find which institutions involved themselves there and in which ways. At this point a quick reaction was essential. Sometimes a charity would announce (for instance, through a Facebook post), that it would tour select villages with blankets and food over the coming days across a set itinerary. Another institution would announce that it could provide shelter or cooked food in a given place and it was important to share where exactly this service was being offered. The volunteers used a shared spreadsheet to gather the data and a map to visualize it.

A second initiative, led by Saikat Maiti, used the Open Street Map project to map “high priority” areas in West Bengal – those where the cyclone’s landfall hit heaviest. The initiative focused on the Sagar Island district, located in the Ganges river delta. Netizens taking part in this project primarily located damaged and demolished buildings and pinned them on the map. 

A third initiative, led by the Quarantined Student-Youth Network, focused on running  “People’s Kitchens” to offer cooked meals to people affected by the cyclone in various districts of West Bengal. As the name implies, the grassroots-level group had formed earlier to provide food to migrant workers left stranded in various Indian cities when the pandemic lockdown began. When Amphan hit, however, the Bengali students that belong to the collective started to focus on families affected by the storm. 

The main takeaway of these initiatives is that commonly accessible internet tools – such as editable maps or spreadsheets – allow private netizens, including those working from afar, to collect significant data that may be useful in the immediate phase of tackling the aftermath of a national disaster. These are especially important when there is diligent involvement by a number of netizens, focus on narrow and well-defined goals, and a good division of labor. Crucially, however, accessing some information requires not only internet skills but also linguistic competence (in this case knowledge of Bengali, Odiya, and Hindi came in handy, opening a wider array of sources). Another stage of such efforts, however, is to effectively and promptly share the collected information with either state institutions or the affected people.