Cyclone Ditwah and Disaster Capitalism A WARMING PLANET, EXHAUSTED ECOSYSTEMS AND DEEP INEQUALITIES CONSPIRE TOGETHER

Cyclone Ditwah tore through Sri Lanka with a frightening force, leaving behind washed-out villages, broken roads, drowned fields, and thousands of families trying to rebuild their lives from the mud.

- By Sushovan Dhar

But as the waters recede and statistics slowly replace human stories, one uncomfortable truth remains pertinent.

Disasters like Ditwah do not fall from the sky fully formed. They are shaped long before the clouds gather, and the damage they cause is written into the economic, ecological, and political choices societies made over decades.

What we witnessed was not merely a meteorological event but the intersection of a warming planet, weakened public systems, exhausted ecosystems, and deep inequalities.

Increasingly, scholars call this era the "Capitalocene": a time when capitalism, more than humans in general, drives the climate crisis.

And once the storm passes, another logic takes over disaster capitalism; where the recovery process becomes a new opportunity for profit, privatisation, and control.

Across the Indian Ocean region, signs of a climate catastrophe are all pervasive. The sea around us is warming faster than many other oceans, giving cyclones more fuel to grow fierce in shorter spans of time. Rainfall that once came in predictable rhythms now arrives in violent bursts. Wetlands that softened the blow of floods have been drained or built over. Mangroves that absorbed cyclone surges have been cut for shrimp farms. Hill slopes that held their soil for centuries now collapse after a few hours of rain.

These trends extend beyond Sri Lanka, reverberating throughout South Asia. Wetlands in India's Chennai and Mumbai have transformed into commercial real estate. In Bangladesh and the Sundarbans, mangrove belts have shrunk. Floods of historic scale have followed years of drought in Pakistan. In Nepal, deforestation and unplanned construction amplify landslides.

In this wider landscape, Ditwah becomes part of a much larger story. A region living on the frontlines of climate change, shaped not by nature alone but by decisions rooted in profit, convenience, and obsession with GDP growth.