Evaluating the resiliency of critical facilities to floods in rural Bihar: a network-based approach

Robust critical infrastructure systems (CIS) are vital for strengthening community resilience to recurring floods in rural India. However, significant evidence gaps persist in the resilience assessment of CIS in India, largely due to data scarcity. This study explores the applicability of the Hybrid Social–Physical Networks (HSPN) model as a resiliency evaluation framework in rural Bihar. We apply the HSPN model to assess the response of the residential and health infrastructure networks under five flooding scenarios of the Kamla River flowing through the Ghanshyampur Administrative Block (GAB). We simulated two hypothetical flood scenarios using the HEC-RAS 1D hydraulic model and mapped the residential network’s recovery. Resiliency was computed as a time-averaged recovery function of the network’s global efficiency. A sharp decline in network resiliency is observed in conditions of higher discharge in Scenario 2 (resiliency value R = 0.48, Discharge = 606,573 Cusecs) as compared to Scenario 1 (R = 0.95, Discharge = 56,503 Cusecs). Scenario 3 (R = 0.80) shows the ability of the HSPN to capture delays due to road damage in real flood scenarios. We used two additional scenarios to assess the health services’ resiliency during the 2017 Kamla floods by weighting the health centers based on their operability and capacity. Dysfunctional health centers considerably reduce resiliency in Scenario 5 (R = 0.17) compared to optimal operational conditions in Scenario 4 (R = 0.67). Our findings highlight the potential of network-based resiliency models for planning flood-resilient critical infrastructure in rural India.