Natural disasters

 Drought: 

• A drought happens when there is no rain for a long period of time.
• In a drought, plants do not grow properly as streams and rivers dry up, plants and animals die.
• Without rain, the plants that are food for land animals and birds die.
• When waterways dry up; there is scarcity of drinking water for wildlife.
• Fish and other animals that live in streams, rivers and dams, die.
• The cause for this lack of rain can be natural global patterns of air circulation, like in The Sahara desert where the winds are very strong, where it's naturally very dry and very sunny.  

Scenario during drought

 Case Study: 

• With the failure of the monsoon in several areas of Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh in 1999, there was a serious drought.
• The extreme water scarcity had been devastating.
• Apart from Saurashtra and Kachchh, the districts of Dahod and Panchmahals in Gujarat as well as Jhabua and Dhar in the neighbouring Madhya pradesh faced a serious drinking water crisis.

Flood:

• Just as too little rain is bad, too much rain is bad as well.
• It leads to water being everywhere; sometimes the entire area gets submerged in water. This condition is called flood.
• During a flood, rivers overflow, water levels in lakes increase, and the soil gets too soggy and waterlogged.

Flood

• During floods, plants and crops die either due water clogging or due to soil being washed away, robbing their roots of support.

Scenario during flood

• In such waterlogged conditions, many disease-causing germs multiply and cause water-borne diseases.
• Sometimes water-borne diseases can even lead to an epidemic, affecting thousands of people at the same time.
• A flood can thus lead to many conditions - like disease, starvation, and even loss of life and property.
• A flood can also cause the same effect on the food chain as drought.
• Both droughts and floods are natural disasters - unfortunate events brought about by nature - that can have a very strong effect on the lives of people.
• The economy of a country can crumble as a result of losing people, property, goods, and many more things.

Case Study:

• It was one of the most disastrous floods in the history of Bihar, an impoverished and densely populated state in India.
• A breach in the Kosi embankment near the Indo-Nepal border (at Kusha in Nepal) occurred on 18 August 2008.
• The flood killed 250 people and forced nearly 3 million people from their homes in Bihar.
• More than 300,000 houses were destroyed and at least 340,000 hectares (840,000 acres) of crops were damaged.
• Villagers in Bihar ate raw rice and flour mixed with polluted water.
• Hunger and disease were widespread.