New Delhi: There is nothing like a ‘national disaster’ however grave and widespread the calamity is, according to the Union home ministry. The official confirmation in this regard invalidates the prospect of flood-affected areas in Kerala getting special financial aid.

The country has had several instances of state governments and opposition parties eyeing political mileage and asking the Centre to declare a region’s calamity as a ‘national disaster’, but they are invariably rejected by the Centre, top bureaucrats in Delhi point out. It only takes the state to request the involvement of central agencies in relief and rescue operations for the Union government to act promptly in general, they added.

Citing an instance, the officials recalled the 1999 Odisha super cyclone that claimed 10,000 human lives. That time, the central government announced at Rs 250-crore financial aid to the eastern state, but never termed the tragedy a ‘national disaster’.

Similar instances of monetary and manual help followed in subsequent major calamities, but none of them were declared a ‘national disaster’. These include the 2005 floods in Maharashtra (death toll 1,094), the 2009 deluge in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka when the Krishna river swelled and killed 300 people, a cloud-burst in J&K’s Ladakh that claimed 257 lives a year later and the 2013 Uttarakhand floods and landslides that killed over 4,000 people.

The Disaster Management Act, 2005, cites norms on forming disaster response funds at the central and state levels. The affected state submits its estimate of losses following a natural disaster, to which the Centre responds by announcing aid after scanning the statistics. Earlier there was a National Calamity Contingency Fund in vogue; today that is part of the National Disaster Response Fund.

When the state’s disaster response fund proves to be insufficient to deal with a major natural calamity that has affected it, demands are raised on seeking help from the national disaster response fund. But such moves don’t necessarily yield the desired results on a priority basis.

Kerala, for now, has got interim relief (including Rs 500 crore Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced this weekend), and more will reach the tragedy-hit state based on the Centre’s estimates, according to Union home ministry sources.