No need to guess or panic any more. The Bangaloreans will soon have a ready reckoner to refer to with just a click of the mouse whenever they need to know the seismic vulnerability of the locality they live in or are planning to build or buy a home. Union Minister for Science and Technology Kapil Sibal said that the Seismic Micro-zonation of Bangalore would be complete very soon. He added that a multi-disciplinary expert group set up by Union Government’s Department of Science and Technology (DST) was working on the project.

Mr Sibal was in Guwahati to release the report on the Seismic Micro-zonation of the northeastern city. He said that the DST had been carrying out a similar exercise in 36 other cities across the country.

The Seismic Micro-zonation is a process of classifying a geographic domain into small units and making an assessment to find out each unit’s vulnerability and possible impact on it and the loss it would suffer in case of a tremor.

Mr Sibal said that the seismic micro-zonation maps would immensely benefit the administrators, city planners, architects, builders and common people.

“If you know that the locality where you have built your home or embarked on a construction project is highly or moderately vulnerable to quakes, you would be able to add necessary safeguards to minimize the impact of a future tremor,” he said.

After Jabalpur, Delhi and Sikkim, Guwahati is the fourth place where the DST has completed the process of Seismic Hazards and Risk Micro-zonation.

The secretary of the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences, P S Goel, said that Bangalore could well be the fifth to be micro-zoned for seismic hazards.

Prof S K Nath of Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, said that the seismic micro-zonation of a region involved study of geology and geomorphology, bedrock profiles, landslide hazards, seismicity, seismotectonics land-use distribution, site response and geotechnology, strong motion acceleration analysis and synthesis, site classification and demographic distribution.

Prof Nath has been involved with the micro-zonation of both Guwahati and Bangalore. Mr Sibal stressed on the need of micro-zonation mapping on the scale of 1:10000 scale for Bangalore and other cities to ensure more accuracy in risk assessment and pre-disaster mitigation planning.