Laws and Government policies of disaster mitigation and management are usually criticized on the ground that they have so far been informed by what is called a ‘top-down approach’. A research paper on ‘Disaster Management (Amendment) Act 2024: Old Wine in a New Bottle’ published as recently as in late-July 2025, for instance, comments that the said amendment could hardly address the problem of “excessive centralisation” that, according to the author, marked the original Act of 2005. Even the Uttarakhand State Disaster Management Authority’s draft on ‘Stakeholders’ Engagement Plan’ under the World Bank project on ‘Uttarakhand Disaster Preparedness and Resilience’ circulated in October 2023 offers very limited scope for ‘public consultations’. The draft allows the stakeholders to offer ‘feedback’ only on the basis of the ‘information provided to and circulated among’ them. One wonders if the entire lifeworld of the people could ever be broken into mere fragments of ‘feedback’. While one may dismiss these criticisms as unkind at their best and exaggerated at their worst, one would do well to bring in the views from the grassroots to bear on our policies and body of laws. Amrithagiri Himalaya has been working in this direction. The immediate objectives of the workshop are:To develop an understanding of the lifeworld of the villagers by translating the fragments of ‘information’ we elicit from them into some kind of a holistic knowledge and worldview (Anthropological researches on Uttarakhand, for instance, mostly reflect on how villagers associate the hills with the sacred and the plains with the profane or dirt);   To treat them as subjects of knowledge and not as mere informants (We step back as the villagers converse amongst themselves in the workshop);
To design appropriate methodologies for understanding their lifeworld and worldview;
To mainstream the knowledge thus acquired in a way that might slowly feed into our laws and policies as instruments of governance.
Sessions will be organized with these four immediate objectives in mind and the expected outcome is to consolidate and add value to the work already done by the organisation and detail out, if possible, a future plan of action that will help the villagers and other stakeholders address the disasters. The date and venue of the workshop will be intimated shortly and will comprise community leaders, villagers, local level thought leaders, early career professionals, activists and mid-level local officers and a few academics.