Equip people with disaster management skills, says ZP CEO

Zilla Panchayat CEO Kanagavalli has said that the concept of disaster management has gained momentum in the aftermath of tsunami that hit Indian east coast in 2004.

Speaking after inaugurating the two-day workshop on ‘automation of Udupi district disaster management plan’ on Wednesday, the CEO felt the need for systematic management plan for checking disaster. 

She said humanbeings should efficiently manage and get equipped with the skills of disaster management and should work on war footing. Karnataka is in a safer zone unlike the states on east coast, that are prone to natural disasters very often. Udupi has been selected in the second phase of the project by the centre to implement disaster management.

Disaster management

Course coordinator R Dharmaraju said the project covers the entire state of Karnataka by December 2014 and  is taken up for four years. The plan is revised every year for the effective accomplishment. However, the major obstacle for carrying out the plans as per the design is the lack of coordination between the officials of different departments, he pointed. The automation of disaster management enables the software development, which demands for the exclusive information of resource persons that are available at village and local level.

The information is updated following the changes in the data. A mobile device is made available for each village and training is offered to six individuals. The trained persons should pass on the information to the server through the mobile device, following the disaster.

 The server will design the action plan to connect the local resource persons, who can help to mitigate the damages and for effective measures of disaster management, he explained.

Dharmaraju said that Raichur district was taken up as a pilot project and the plans were implemented there successfully.

The project is introduced in 10 districts and Udupi is the 11th district, he added.
Mangalore

The automation of disaster management is important specially because the officers who are responsible to manage the disasterous situations face difficulty in finding the things in place, said Deputy Commissioner A B Ibrahim.

He was speaking after inaugurating a workshop on ‘Automation of Dakshina Kannada District Disaster Management Plan,’ jointly organised by the Administrative Training Institute, Mysore and the district administration at Zilla Panchayat hall. The DC said that the Indian government has introduced the Disaster Management Act, 2005 with an intention to get the officials concerned ready to meet the situations.

ZP Chief Executive Officer Tulasi Maddineni who was present at the programme, cited the examples of fire disaster in a school in Tamil Nadu and emphasised the need to make preparatory arrangements to face any kind of disaster.

Addressing the participants, ATI Faculty R Dharmaraju said that Dakshina Kannada is the 11th district in the State where the workshop is organised. Accordingly, the places which are prone to disaster in every district will be identified and uploaded in the server and transferred to the website.

 GPS and SMS will play a major role in the automated disaster management plan, he said.