Union Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah said that today, in the field of disaster response in the world, we are standing on an equal footing and even ahead in many areas. Attending the Annual Conference on Capacity Building for Disaster Response – 2022 organized by National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) as the Chief Guest in New Delhi, he said with a holistic integrated approach, NDMA headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, SDMAs headed by all Chief Ministers, disaster management has been taken to the ground with confidence by the Central and State Governments.
Before the nineties, he said, we had a relief-centric approach, there was no scope for saving lives and property and it was not part of the planning. Now we have done a lot of work on the scientific program of saving lives and property based on early warning, proactive prevention, mitigation and pre-preparation.
For the first time, a plan was made for horizontal and vertical integration of all the agencies and departments of the government and the result is in front of us. In this scheme, the government has been linked up to the level of panchayat, urban local bodies and different government departments, making the collector the nodal agency.
In 2016, 11 disasters were included in this plan and in 2019, 17 disasters have been included in it. This tells that we are continuously working on all kinds of disasters and we have brought down the number of casualties due to disasters a lot and this is our great achievement, he added.
The Union Home Minister said that if someone thinks that disaster response work cannot be done by resources or research paper alone. Building the capacity of those who take it to the bottom is very important as many agencies have to work together.
Amit Shah said that today due to technology and science, we get early information, but disaster response cannot be successful until the professional mastery is not attained in taking the accurate information to the bottom, alerting the disaster prone place from the point of view of disaster, taking action to save lives and then to minimize the damages to property. He said that the protocol for coordination between 5-6 agencies related to all these works and its practical experience is also very important.
