In India, states and local governments have access to about $6 billion for disaster risk mitigation over the five years (2021-2025).
Key points
- This is in addition to resource of $23 billion meant for preparedness, response and recovery.
- In just over a decade, India has been able to reduce the loss of lives from cyclones to less than 2%.
- India is now developing ambitious mitigation programmes to reduce the risk of losses from all hazards – Landslides, Glacial Lake Outburst Floods, Earthquakes, Forest Fire, Heat Waves, and Lightning.
- Implementing Common Alerting Protocol, which will integrate Alert Generating Agencies with Disaster Managers and Telecom Service Providers.
- This will ensure dissemination of geo-targeted alerts in regional languages to reach, each one of 1.3 billion citizens of our country.
- Under India’s presidency, G20 members have agreed to establish a Working Group on Disaster Risk Reduction. The five priorities identified by the G20 Working Group – early warning for all, resilient infrastructure, improved financing of DRR, systems and capacities for response and ‘build back better’, and eco-system based approaches to DRR – will provide added impetus to the achievement of Sendai targets globally.
- In addition, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure, presently co-led by India and the United States is bringing about transformation in the way we plan, design, build, and maintain infrastructure systems in the 21st century.
Common Alerting Protocol (CAP)
- The Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) has been adopted as ITU-T Recommendation X.1303.
- It is a simple but general format for exchanging all-hazard emergency alerts and public warnings over all kinds of ICT networks, allowing a consistent warning message to be disseminated simultaneously over many different warning systems, thus increasing warning effectiveness while simplifying the warning task.
