Examine the institutional and fiscal framework for drought relief under the Disaster Management Act, 2005. How effective is the SDRF-NDRF architecture?

Drought is a notified disaster under the Disaster Management Act, 2005 [1], and Maharashtra's move to declare drought after a prolonged dry spell tests the Act's two-tier relief machinery. The architecture is statutorily sound, but its triggers and timelines blunt relief at the point of delivery.

Institutional framework

• The DM Act, 2005 creates the NDMA-SDMA-DDMA chain, with the Ministry of Home Affairs as nodal for response funds [1][2].
• Declaration is a State function; grading follows the Manual for Drought Management, 2016, which classifies drought as normal, moderate or severe using rainfall as the mandatory trigger plus four impact indicators — agriculture, soil moisture, hydrology and remote sensing [3].
• Central assistance flows only after a State memorandum, central team visit and inter-ministerial scrutiny.

Fiscal framework

• SDRF — Section 48(1)(a); the primary fund, shared 75:25 (Centre:State), and 90:10 for North-Eastern and Himalayan States [2].
• NDRF — Section 46; wholly Centre-funded, supplementing SDRF only for disasters of severe nature when SDRF is inadequate [2].
• Drought relief runs 30 days, extendable to 60, and 90 in severe drought, with State Executive Committee extensions capped at 25% of the annual SDRF allocation [2].

Assessing effectiveness

• Strengths: assured, rule-based funding replaces ad hoc grants; objective satellite and soil-moisture indicators curb politically inflated claims; the framework operationalises the Supreme Court's direction in Swaraj Abhiyan v. Union of India (2016) for a standardised method [4].
• Weaknesses: NDRF opens only at "severe", requiring several impact indicators to turn severe together, so genuinely distressed districts are graded moderate and left to State finances [3]; a seasonal-rainfall-centric trigger misses crop-killing intra-season dry spells; State yield-based measures (paisewari) diverge from central grading; and no binding time limit for declaration exists, so short relief windows are consumed by procedure [2][4].

The architecture is fiscally robust but diagnostically rigid. Adding dry-spell duration as a trigger, calibrating the severity threshold, and fixing decision deadlines would align it with the Supreme Court's intent and with cooperative federalism in disaster response.