The provision for UDMAs has been included in the Bill to amend the Disaster Management Act of 2005, that was introduced in Lok Sabha on Thursday.

The Bill also mandates the setting up of State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) in every state. The 2005 Act only provided for the constitution of the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF). Several states already have raised their own SDRFs. The bill mandates it for everyone. The UDMAs, to be headed by the municipal commissioner, will be entrusted with the responsibility of preparing and implementing city-level disaster management plans.

In recent years, a number of cities have been paralysed because of disasters, mostly caused by extreme rainfall resulting in flooding events. The most striking example was Chennai in 2015, when a record-breaking spell of rains in December had submerged large parts of the city for multiple days and resulted in the death of at least 400 people.

The Chennai event was the worst flooding in any Indian city after the 2005 incident in Mumbai that was caused by nearly 900 mm of rainfall within a few hours. Mumbai and Bengaluru have faced similar situations multiple times in the last one decade.

UDMAs would enable the preparation of city-level disaster management plans instead of the multiple district level plans within the same city. But not everyone in the Lok Sabha approved of the government’s plan. Congress member Manish Tewari opposed the Bill and said that under schedule seven of Article 246 of the Constitution, none of the entries in List 1,2 or 3 of the Constitution dealing with central and state subjects mention the issue of disaster management. He said that the government should amend the concurrent list to have a proper entry to cover the issue of disaster management. “The reason I say this is that when a disaster happens, the first responders are local authorities,” he said.

The Congress MP said the law’s legislative power should be properly defined. He said any law based on “derived legislative power” may not stand the test of constitutionality. “The second reason I am opposing this Bill is that this legislation… suffers from the malady of excessive delegation.”

TMC member from Dum Dum (West Bengal) Saugata Roy opposed it and said the multiplicity of authority will create confusion. The Bill was later introduced by a voice vote.