Disaster resilience: India is striding towards global fora as a nation with many potentialities

  

Talking about disaster management in the country has performed 2 decades of mind boggling facts and figures. We are in the rare zone of defense, if we say anything note worthy on the disaster resilience index.  When taking into account of our disaster resilience, we are somewhat contended with more “blessed” status than many other countries, be it in the case of facing earthquake, Tsunami, flood, landslides, to name a few of the most events that counted these days as Natural origin, because no Natural event is termed as "disaster". They are called "hazards". It's rather our inappropriateness to account for the impact that our establishments are not able to cope with up and finally "hazard" turns to "disaster". Even urban floods are taking serious tolls due to our failure/incapacity to prepare and anticipate the aftermath of ill planned habitations mushrooming around. 

We have established several national and state level organisations, formed well trained dedicated disaster response teams that even effectively helped Japan (2011) and Nepal (2015), conducted several conferences/seminars, works...trained several officials about the preparation of DM plans and formation of Emergency Operation Centres (EOC), initiated several projects and mitigation programs that trained teachers, engineers, architects, opened up higher education  hubs to prepare disaster managers for the country and even prepared several Post Disaster Need Assessment (PDNA) documents for ascertaining budgetary support for reconstruction works.  The extent of research works in our R&D hubs are mostly confined to establishing instruments, such as seismometers, diff. GPS, Automated weather station, data Buoy.. and taking data for rightful interpretation, which most often than not; are effectively interpreted for societal use. Some of these areas, such as Local weather forecasting in mobile apps, earthquake early warning, warning for hail storm and ground penetrating thunder bolts, warning for flash floods or heavy rain fall…are yet to catch attention of our scientific communities.

In order to harness societal gains in some of the most important areas as above, let’s not count on how many (costly) devices we have bought or yet to be deployed or awaited for Govt.’s nod for fund release. While country's integrity is very important, it's also important to work in synergy, specially in science and technology domain. Taking this into consideration, following aspects may be crucial:

1. Let's us not decorate any more our labs or department teaming with costly equipment or commercial softwares, which are just procured during project period and their usages end with the project reporting or after gaining of the project associate and his coveted research degree, if any. 
2. Let us not defuse our energy in blaming or criticizing other fellow country men or colleagues, for what they are not upto. However, constructive criticism is always welcome in research domain and nurturing this culture in our  context often losing it sheen in many institutes of the country.
3. Let's not work in compartments and procure same costly equipment from abroad for the sake of either having them in many research labs or using them repeatedly to prove the science of the Nature, which is already understood. Innovations and recreation of Nature's event in labs are the basic foundation of research. 

Let these programs are empathized more exclusively than any other scientific charm we continue to enjoy. Because, “right to have warning information” of the events mentioned above are socially relevant and in order to acclaim those for the society is more important than our natural instinct for loving children or supporting their education. 

Let it be our national mission to have disaster resilience society altogether….because, whatever items mentioned here have already been achieved for societal use elsewhere in the world. Why shall we lag behind!