“Earthquake Disaster Mitigation in India: A Long and Windy-road ahead”

Earthquake Disaster mitigation is though simple to understand but still remains very difficult issue to tackle in practice especially in developing countries like India. The country has faced several earthquake related disasters in the past and the recent earthquakes in India (Gujarat Earthquake, 2001) have blown an alarming whistle exposing the true and disturbing picture of the state of preparedness of the country and its citizens against such natural hazards which potentially turn to be a disasters taking huge toll of life. So time has come to take this issue seriously and systematically to consider each case step by step and slowly but surely ensuring final goal of Building Earthquake Safer Community. You cannot have overnight solution to this kind of problem so basically it demands slow and sustainable development of the capacity of the community to face the future risk and it should continue till the very end. So how one can start--

We believe that earthquake preparedness and long term mitigation planning should go hand in hand with active involvement of different stakeholders. Looking at the present situation in the country and the scale of problem, one of the easy ways to tackle this problem is through increased public awareness about earthquake preparedness. In other words, telling them –

1. What they should do and what not…..

2. Informing them about scale of the risk in terms of likely hazardous situation they can face if it occurs….

3. Informing them how they can ensure smooth and safe action plan through simple and easy to tips…..

4. Identifying the short and long term goals and providing tools to execute those task….

Creating awareness cannot be achieved by single tool or approach and it remains unbounded problem due to the classic structure of our society. “Rich remains more unsecured due to the vulnerable resources he possess around him and the poor become even more vulnerable due to the extreme dependency and the scares resources he has to face such disasters”.

One of the critical factor that hurdles this process, is poor information sharing process between the scientific community (who can perceive what good / bad that can happen in a extreme situation to the society and what are the short or long term countermeasures that should be undertaken ….) and root user (who in a extreme situation always face the catastrophy if not made aware in time….).

We as a part of the scientific community take this as a challenge and aims to reduce this gap by understanding needs of the different users. The user in this case may be government organization, private sector, non-governmental organization or the community at risk. Each of these users needs information in different forms so that he or she can use it effectively in the real time situation for his decision making to avoid potential disaster-

Earthquake often teaches you lessons and one can always learn from the lessons which others has either experienced or envisasged earlier. Earthquake engineering profession has not been very prominent and popular profession in our country since long time and this has compounded our problems to have adequate information in different areas of its research. On the contrary, countries such as USA and Japan has done tremendously well during last few decades in this field and hence developing countries such as ours, should able to learn the lessons from their experiences and it should be done quickly before the next big one strikes….!!

Here are some of the basic materials, which were prepared as a part of Emergency Preparedness Campaign by Emergency Management Division of Washington Military Department of USA. The efforts are very focused and designed to make it effective at its disposal--

1. Disaster Preparation Handbook : An Emergency Planning and Response Guide

2. A Roadmap of Emergency Preparedness

3. Emergency Preparedness and Planning Calender

4. A Guide to Perform Statewide Earthquake Drill

We recommend this to visitor of our website as a basic information material on disaster awareness.

Recently we have also conducted one study regarding earthquake hazard assessment and information dissemination in Mumbai India as part of the project, which is funded by Provention Consortium of World Bank, Washington DC, USA and here are some of our experiences which we think are of paramount importance and hence should be considered as a need of hour-

Earthquake Hazard Assessment and Information Dissemination in Mumbai, India.