Online Emergency help for Disaster Management
- Dr. S. V. Ranade
India has been experiencing many large scale disasters in recent years and has proved to be a capable of surmounting these challenges and even helping neighbouring countries in relief and rehabilitation works. In India there are two main national level agencies for disaster management i.e disastermanagement.org and ndmindia.nic.in. Still it is necessary to build a robust and quick response network for coordinating various government and private agencies in this task and streamline process of decision making and deployment of machinery, manpower and goods to affected area in shortest time.
In 2002, when I was working in Walchand college of Engineering, I was assigned a job of organizing student group to work as volunteers in building Disaster Response Network, an initiative taken by Hindustan Construction Company in coordinating construction and transportation companies in India for providing location specific immediate help to disaster management work.The idea was innovative. Disaster relief efforts are most effective when local resources are leveraged by all resources available nearby with private companies or organizations. The DRN was defined as follows The Disaster Response Network (DRN) is a network of engineering and transportation companies who are committed to assist humanitarian organizations with their disaster relief efforts by providing infrastructure-related and transportation services. Disasters occur at any place causing sudden damage to property and loss of life. They can be small like fire, building collapse, accident, bomb blast or they may be covering large area due to natural calamities like earthquake, cyclones, land slides, flood etc. The main requirement in many cases is vehicles for transport of affected people or relief teams, heavy construction machinery like cranes, safety appliances, supply of food, medicines, shelter materials etc. Generally the district collector has to organize the relief efforts through district level Disaster Management team. He mobilizes the resources available with government agencies as regards manpower, machinery, vehicles.The private construction companies engaged in nearby infrastructure projects and transportation companies operative in the area can provide the machinery and manpower without any time delay due to orders and permissions if such companies are bound by DRN guidelines.This could strengthen district disaster management team in its efforts to provide immediate relief to affected victims and speedy rehabilitation. It was decided to collect information about resource availability with private construction and transport companies in India by contacting them and getting a questionnaire filled up. It was also planned to visit state government agencies and build amutual understanding for fixing the modalities of harnessing such help. Stundets travelling and lodging expenses were to be borne by HCC. I was very excited to work on this project.I had formed a group of student volunteers and we collected lot of information about disaster management at that time from internet sources, professors at NICMAR, Pune and HCC engineers. We found that there are many international agencies working for disaster management and are ready to cooperate with national agencies with financial and other forms of help. We had prepared detailed questionnaire for collecting resource data from companies.
The format was
Type of Disaster - Earthquake
Items Available, - If Yes,
Quantity - Location -
Time for deployment
The list of items for earthquake relief was as follows -
Metal Cutters, Gas Cutters, Masks, Cranes of different pay loads, Ambulances, Communication system, Tipper for taking debris, Cameras, Ladders, Ropes, Bulldozer, J.C.B., Gumboots, Helmets, Stretchers, Gloves, Oxygen cylinder, Fire Extinguisher, Disinfection Equipments, Shuttering, Angels, Scaffolding, Fuel, Trekking equip., Water tankers, Generators, Mobile batteries, Sensors, Fire brigade, roofing sheets, Asbestos sheets, Empty drums etc. Similar lists were made for all types of disasters.
The project was progressing well. But university examinations came in the way. As the examination approached the student volunteers stopped coming for the work. I was discouraged. I could not pursue the students to join the project as it was voluntary participation. I had to inform the HCC about my inability of continuing the work. Even engineers at HCC who had planned their tour programs were unhappy. It is learned later, that HCC carried out the project with the help of IIT, Mumbai. I do not know what is the present status of the project.
But I sincerely feel that it is a really necessary project and should be established as a broad based NGO with employment of young engineering graduates who are in search of job. The scope of the project may be made comprehensive to include health and food requirements. This will help the government agencies in tackling disasters and providing immediate relief works and would aid in long term project of renovation and rehabilitation. With the advancement of information technology in last 12 years, new sensors and remote data communication systems have made the task of such coordination very easy and full advantage of such online data collection systems, GIS, Cloud data mining and analyzing services should betaken to make such organization a nodal agency in providing effective relief work in disaster affected area.