National Academy in India Takes an Important Step Forward

The National Academy of Agricultural Sciences of India recently organised a special technical session in the Seventh National Agricultural Sciences Congress (16-18 Feb; Poona; India) on "Science and Tsunami". That was quite a move forward for the Academy! A number of top scientits of India connected with oceanography, geology, remote sensing and plantation crops as well as fisheries made very good presentations. The origin/cause of Tsunami was well explained. The damage assessment was rigorous. A lot of progress in infusing science in disaster management, I must say. The Academy council did a very good job putting this together.
The preparedness part was however treated as a component of the prediction system, which I thought was a bit of a let down. Academics are yet to realise that expesnive systems for prediction have not proved useful if not linked with community-managed/owned channels of communication. There is a good move forward, and there is scope for moving further on.

community-managed EWS

Further on preparedness: the local or the community-ownership is at the heart of any system or arrangement to foster disaster preparedness. Science-derived alerts have greater impact if they can be delivered to community-owned and managed channels of communication.

There was a great cyclone that attacked the coast of Orissa in India on the 29th Oct 1999. This was one of the worst disasters in recent Indian history, claiming a toll of nearly 20000 human lives besides extensive property damage. I learnt subsequently that the district administration had indeed installed sirens in many coastal villages that would go off when a cyclonic storm approached the shore (activiated from the district collectorate). However, the equipment was in a state of repair and the administration of the area was not aware of this status.

In the Tsunami attack on the Pondicherry coast, the local public announcement arrangement was found useful in saving hundreds of lives. The arrangement had been set up at the request of the local community, and had been maintained by them to issue alerts on bad weather to the fisher families. They had found it useful on many an occasion.

Any Early Warning System (EWS) should integrate the top-down flow of science-based alert information with the community-owned and managed channels of communication. In a crisis, one without the other is not likely to render help to the vulnerable families.

Tsunami attack and the importance of preparedness

The recent Tsunami attack in Pondicherry region (South India) resulted in the death of about 300 individuals and property damage running close to a hundred million dollars. The affected coastline was not more than 50 km in length.

Accounts from the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation based in Madras, India(www.mssrf.org), indicated that two rural onshore sites had significantly lower loss of lives. This was due to the stndard practice in those locations where a loud speaker was used in a public information center to make announcements about important events. This had been used since 1999 to make weather-related announcements and was linked to an internet-connected PC. A nummber of individuals were aware of the standard practice.

Thus, when the news of a possible sea rise was received in a village home, this arrangement was used to alert every household and a number of people made it to safe locations in time.

I used to be involved in setting this village project up and I note that the advantage derived was not just from the access to the Internet, but in having a local strategy and standardised practice for popular communication. This is a point that David Dickson, wellknown farm science communicator, also made in a piece on Scidev.net.

I believe this synergy between a top-down approach and a locally-founded and contextually-sensitive communication system lies at the heart of preparedness among the ordinary people. This is probably the best way to help rural families receive science-derived information quickly. Given that South Asia is the most disaster-prone region in the world, there is a need to build generic systems for popular preparedness to cope with a variety of events-floods, cyclones, wild fires, drought etc.

In this blog, I will present you with some ideas and a lot of information on what drought prepraredness.