India today favoured cementing institutional mechanism to strengthen the disaster response mechanism amongst South Asian countries.
Inaugurating the first "South Asian Annual Disaster Management Exercise" (SAADMEx), Union Minister of State for Home Kiren Rijiju appealed to all eight member nations of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) to accord high priority and develop better concept of disaster management.
Rijiju said India has taken the lead role in the region by hosting the first SAADMEx as India is the largest nation in this region and also because a lot has been done by India in the field of disaster risk reduction (DRR) in the last 16 months.
Pointing out that South Asia is the most disaster prone region in the world, The Minister said the region may face disasters more frequently in the days to come and hence awareness in the minds of the people has to be created.
"We have to empower people since they would be the ones who are going to face it," he said.
Rijiju said South Asian nations have much more to do and work out a proper laid down objective for themselves on how to be better prepared to face disasters.
He said any government programme has to incorporate DRR in their framework as a policy matter and announced that Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed by National Institute of Disaster Management with Jawaharlal Nehru University for M. Phil and PhD courses on disaster management.
O P Singh, Director General, National Disaster Response
Force (NDRF), while welcoming the delegates, said conducting comprehensive disaster management exercise among SAARC nations on annual basis is need of the time to develop better mechanism for tackling disasters and also minimize the impact.
Singh said disaster response simulation exercise is the test of preparedness of response mechanism of the state.
Addressing the inaugural session, Arjun Bahadur Thapa, Secretary General, SAARC said that formulation of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) and organising disaster management exercise were decided during the Jakarta Disaster Management Summit.
After the inaugural session, a table top exercise was conducted by NDRF. The purpose of the exercise was to provide participants with an opportunity to review and discuss disaster response plans and capabilities of an affected country by both national authorities and SAARC region countries.
The SAADMEx will continue till November 26, 2015. On November 24, joint field training exercise on collapsed structure search and rescue (CSSR) will be conducted at NTH Complex, Kamla Nehru Nagar, Ghaziabad (Uttar Pradesh).
On November 25, joint field training exercise on chemical emergency will be conducted at Greater Noida (UP). The four-day long SAADMEx-2015 is being organized jointly by NDMA, NIDM, NDRF and MHA.
Delegations and rescuers from each of the eight SAARC nations-Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are participating in SAADMEx-2015.
