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The much-awaited National Disaster Management Plan was released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this month. The plan closes a critical gap in our disaster management system — while most states and districts have prepared their plans, the national plan that was supposed to guide this process at the sub-national level was missing. This invited criticism from the Supreme Court, the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament and the Comptroller and Auditor General. Surely the government would no longer be embarrassed for its failure to write a plan even a decade after the mandate of the Disaster Management Act. But India has miles to go if the vision of the plan to ‘make India disaster resilient’ has to be a reality. There are several problems in the National Disaster Management Plan. First, it fails to lay down a clear and practical roadmap. It is too generic in its identification of the activities to be undertaken by the central and states governments for dis...

Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi today released the National Disaster Management Plan (NDMP). This is the first ever national plan prepared in the country.   Minister of Home Affairs Shri Rajnath Singh, Minster of State for Home Affairs Shri Kiren Rijiju, and senior officers of the Prime Minister's Office, Ministry of Home Affairs and National Disaster Management Authority were present during the function.   Following are the highlights of the NDMP: ·          The NDMP has been aligned broadly with the goals and priorities set out in the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction. ·          The Vision of the Plan is to “Make India disaster resilient, achieve substantial disaster risk reduction, and significantly decrease the losses of life, livelihoods, and assets – economic, physical, social, cultural and environmental – by maximizing the ability to cope with disasters at all leve...

State to recruit 3,000 volunteers After developing a formidable institutional system in disaster management, the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) is now planning to create a pool of trained civil defence volunteers to reduce disaster risk. The idea is to have 3,000 such volunteers across the State in four years in keeping with a proposal in the first State Disaster Management Plan approved by the government last year. As a pilot project, the National Disaster Management Authority has approved the training of 200 civil defence force volunteers in Kottayam under its Aapatha Mithra scheme. The programme is likely to be launched jointly by the Chief Minister and Revenue Minister on October 13, the International Day for Disaster Reduction. “We are also in the process of activating the Civil Defence Institute at Thrissur spread over 7.50 acres that is at present used by the National Disaster Response Force,” Tomin J. Thachankary, Director General of Fire and Re...