Disaster Management Centre
The Natural Disaster Management Unit of ATI funded by the Government of India conducts regular training programmes, seminars and workshops on natural disaster management, environment and ecology for officials and elected representatives of local government bodies. It has prepared case studies on the unprecedented floods of 2000.
Training Strategy in Disaster Management Centre
Effective management of disaster, be it natural or
human-made, calls for participation of people from all the
cross-section of the society. It is the society which faces huge loss
in terms of lives and property due to the impact of disaster.
India is a disaster-prone Country and West Bengal being one of its States is also multi hazard prone. Almost all kinds of natural hazards having the potential to turn into disasters occur in our State.
From the dawn of civilisation, human society, the natural environment and disaster have been closely interlinked. Both natural disaster and the increasing environmental degradation world wide are serious threats to development. The key elements for development include investment, effective government and social stability. Unfortunately lead to exactly the opposite conditions. Loss of human made and natural capital causes sudden human disinvestments; post disaster relief increases both the financial and administrative burden on the government. Disasters also cause social distabilisation. Thus, the social view of sustainable development indicates that vulnerability to natural disasters is definitely a function of human action and behaviour.
For many years, the response to the disasters was
mainly reactive. More recently, however, our attitude has been changed
and the ‘response mechanism’, now, means a more elaborate
proactive design to projects and policies at all levels,
Disaster hurt people. They injure and kill and
cause emotional trauma and stress. Destruction of homes, livelihood
tools and economic activities cause hardship and spell financial
ruins.
Therefore, for countering disasters our task is
very clear. Development, land-use and habitation policy must be
informed by a thorough understanding of the technical and scientific
need for prevention and mitigation of disasters and integration of
disaster management process with the development programmes.
With the technical knowledge in place, it is now
possible to protect the society against some natural hazards through
engineering and planning techniques. Stronger houses can be built
according to building standards and codes. Land use planning can be
aimed to prevent residential areas from being situated in the
hazardous zone.
As an instrument to increase non-structural
capacity in the field of disaster management, our strategy is to
design training courses which can cater to the need of all the
stakeholders. The stakeholders in this field of disaster management
are not only the government officials but also the Panchayat and
municipal functionaries, persons from Non Government Organisations
(NGO) and Civil Bodies Organisations (CBO) and the local level
volunteers from the community. The government officials are drawn from
the general administrations also from the line departments including
the engineering departments. Their training needs obviously are
different. However, our training designs are generally to cope up with
these different entry behaviour of these trainees who are coming from
different social backgrounds.
Some of our training courses deal with the broader
aspects of disaster management in general along with the outline
knowledge inputs on causes of occurrence and types, vulnerability and
management of commonly occurring disasters in our state. There are
other courses which are specifically on disasters like flood, drought,
cyclone, land-slides, earthquake, etc.
To cater to the need of the stakeholders at the
grass-root level we have designed courses like “Training of Trainers
on Disaster Management (ToT)”. This is basically to create a
‘trainers pool’ by which training can be imparted at the district
and sub-district levels to increase the capacity and competence of the
volunteers, members of Panchayats and urban local bodies and members
of NGOs, CBOs etc.
There are also some training courses based on
cross-cutting issues like ‘gender issues’, ‘psychosocial
issues’, ‘school safety’ in disaster management, ‘disaster and
development’, ‘urban risk mitigation’ etc.
These apart, for the last two years we are
imparting foundation level training of the Relief Officers. This three
week long course has specifically been designed for them and has
inputs on different aspects of disaster management on one hand and
office procedures, noting and drafting, duties and obligations of
public servants etc. on the other hand.
This year we are able to conduct 25 training
courses with the participation of 455 trainees in total. A synopsis of
these training courses with the number of training days and
participants are given in the table below.
In the next year our strategy is to create more
training days with the participation of a larger number of
participants. Some new courses have also been designed and
incorporated in the training calendar of the coming year. A few
courses have also been given to the Regional Training Centres (RTC) so
that trainings can be conducted in a decentralized manner.
Thus, our basic approach is to strengthen the
institutional mechanism in the sphere of disaster management and also
creation of a well coordinated work force for effective management of
disaster.