Entitlement Theory Of Vulnerability

1. Introduction
Vulnerability simply means the susceptibility of social groups to potential losses from natural hazards. It is the characteristics of individuals, households or communities and their condition that influence their capacity to cope with, resist and recover from the impact of a natural hazard (Blaikie et al., 1994; Kelly and Adger, 2000; Cardona, 2003). Hazards such as earthquakes, floods, landslides, hurricanes, droughts etc are the natural phenomena. It becomes disaster when it affects vulnerable populations and the vulnerability itself depends upon people’s access to resources and opportunities. This is similar to the entitlement approach which contends that vulnerability to natural hazard occurs when individual or household
Social class is one of the main contributors to vulnerability. It includes employment opportunities, income, savings, education and medical services, safe drinking water, access to information, access to markets, tools, banking and credit facilities, the quality of human settlements (housing type and construction, infrastructure and lifelines), family structure, political power and representation, social capital and networks etc (Cutter et al., 2003; Bolin and Stanford 1998; Billingsley, 2016). Generally working class (poor people) lack land and other assets, they are unemployed or underemployed, they lack health, education, safe drinking water and sanitation facilities as well as other social services provided by the state. They are the socially, economically and politically disadvantaged groups and they live daily in a state of “permanent emergency”. They are often physically weak because of poor standard of living, they live in sub-standard houses and usually in hazardous places and have relatively little political power (Maskrey,1989 ; Susman et al., 1983; Wisner and Luce, 1993). These are the people who survived a disaster but are unable to recover their livelihoods and are forced to live even in more vulnerable condition. Disaster literature recognizes that all these factors before the disaster make working class people marginal and thus highly vulnerable to hazards such as earthquakes, drought, landslides, floods etc (Blaikie et. al 1994; Bolin and Stanford