Nine Key Objectives and India's Disaster Risk Landscape

The Sendai Gender Action Plan (Sendai GAP) articulates nine interrelated objectives that operationalize gender-responsive principles across the four priorities of the Sendai Framework, seeking by 2030 to reduce gender-related disaster risk and accelerate inclusive disaster risk reduction (DRR). Drawing on recent evidence about India’s multi-hazard exposure, socio-economic inequalities, and gendered vulnerabilities, the paper argues that persistent informational gaps, uneven policy implementation, limited financing for gender-responsive DRR, and weak links between early warning systems and marginalized communities constrain progress.

The analysis highlights opportunities for India to strengthen institutional coordination, scale participatory data collection, incentivize gender criteria in risk-informed investments, and embed sexual and reproductive health and gender-based-violence prevention in emergency planning. The article concludes with policy recommendations and priority actions to align national and subnational DRR strategies with the Sendai GAP, thereby enhancing resilience while advancing gender equality in India.

When floods strike a district in Assam, it is often women who wade through waist-deep water balancing children on their hips and food supplies on their heads, women who lose access to sanitation and healthcare first, and women who are excluded from the village-level committees that decide how relief and reconstruction money is spent. This gendered face of disaster is precisely what the Gender Action Plan to Support Implementation of the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, popularly called the Sendai GAP, was designed to address.

Launched on 18 March 2024 at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the Sendai GAP is not a standalone treaty but an operational companion to the original Sendai Framework adopted in 2015 in Sendai, Japan. Its overarching goal is to accelerate the Sendai Framework's targets by substantially increasing gender-responsive disaster risk reduction (DRR) investment and by decreasing gender-related disaster risk by 2030. To do this, the GAP sets out ‘Nine Key Objectives’, organised under the Sendai Framework's four established priorities, along with 33 recommended actions for governments, UN agencies, civil society and grassroots women's groups.

India's disaster databases have historically recorded casualties and losses in aggregate terms. The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and state disaster management authorities are increasingly being pushed to collect sex- and age-disaggregated data, an approach visible in post-disaster needs assessments after events like the 2018 Kerala floods, where NGOs and UN Women documented how women-headed households faced disproportionately slower recovery.

Programs such as the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority's community-based initiatives have used gender-disaggregated vulnerability mapping to identify which households need targeted cyclone shelters, evacuation transport, or maternal health support during emergencies- directly feeding gender analysis into local planning.

India's National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP) of 2016, revised in 2019, is the world's first national plan explicitly aligned with the Sendai Framework. It incorporates gender as a cross-cutting theme, though implementation still varies widely by state, with newer state DM plans (Bihar, Odisha) more explicitly integrating gender guidelines than older ones.

The Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA) in Gujarat has trained women as "disaster risk reduction leaders" who sit on local disaster management committees, ensuring that evacuation planning and relief distribution reflect women's priorities rather than being decided exclusively by male village heads.

Government schemes for flood-resistant housing under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana in flood-prone Bihar and Assam have, in select districts, prioritized registering house ownership in women's names, linking resilient housing investment with women's economic and property rights.

Microfinance and self-help group (SHG) networks under the National Rural Livelihood Mission have begun piloting weather-indexed insurance products targeted at women farmers in drought-prone Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, improving women's direct access to disaster risk financing rather than routing it exclusively through male household heads.

The India Meteorological Department's cyclone early warning system, paired with last-mile dissemination through Common Service Centres and women-led SHGs in Odisha, has improved reach into households where women are often the primary recipients and disseminators of warnings within the family and neighbourhood.

Following the 2018 Kerala floods, the state government's reconstruction program, "Rebuild Kerala," incorporated consultations with women's collectives (Kudumbashree) in designing housing layouts and livelihood restoration packages, an example frequently cited internationally as good practice in gender-responsive "build back better."

Ensuring access to sexual and reproductive health and rights, and prevention of gender-based violence in disaster contexts remain one of India's weaker links. Post-disaster assessments- including after Super Cyclone Aila in West Bengal (2009), Fani in Odisha (2019) Amphan in West Bengal (2020), and the Assam floods- have repeatedly flagged gaps in hygiene provisions, maternal healthcare continuity, and protection mechanisms against gender-based violence in relief camps. NGOs like Oxfam India and UNFPA India have pushed for dignity kits and women-only safe spaces in camps, but this is not yet standardized across all state relief protocols.

India is one of the world's most disaster-exposed countries, facing cyclones, floods, droughts, landslides, earthquakes, and heatwaves across its diverse geography. It was also among the first countries globally to align a national disaster management plan explicitly with the Sendai Framework, and it has played an active role in global DRR diplomacy, including chairing a G20 Disaster Risk Reduction Working Group during its 2023 presidency. This gives India both the institutional foundation and the diplomatic standing to become a leading implementer of the Sendai GAP. Translating the GAP's nine objectives from policy language into practice requires sustained investment: better sex-disaggregated disaster data systems, mandatory gender budgeting within state disaster management plans, stronger institutional roles for women's collectives like SEWA and Kudumbashree, and above all, closing the persistent gap around reproductive health and protection from gender-based violence in relief settings.

The Sendai GAP's nine key objectives offer a practical roadmap for reshaping disaster risk reduction so that it serves women and marginalized groups rather than overlooking them. India's existing initiatives show that pieces of this roadmap are already being implemented on the ground. The task ahead is to weave these scattered examples into a coherent, nationally consistent, gender-responsive disaster risk reduction architecture by 2030.