Nagaland chief secretary, Pankaj Kumar on Wednesday said that the state was not fully prepared for disasters particularly earthquakes due to poor earthquake resistance structures.
Nagaland has a peculiar weather cycle that was associated with different kinds of risk disasters, said Pankaj Kumar, in his keynote address during the two-day programme on Incident Response System (IRS), organized by Nagaland State Disaster Management Authority (NSDMA) Home Department, at State Capital Convention here on Wednesday.
IRS is a mechanism which provides a systematic, proactive approach guiding the concerned departments and agencies at all levels of government, the private sectors and NGOs to work flawlessly in disaster situation. During rainy season, Kumar said Nagaland has problem of landslides and floods while in dry season, there was a drought problem, fire incidents in forest, villages or towns.
Besides, he said Nagaland was too vulnerable to earthquakes, which could occur anytime.
With such characteristics of the environment and terrain Nagaland was located, the chief secretary said the trained forces team including the villagers should be thoroughly trained on how to respond depending on the situation.
He said though the state has a dynamic team, which has done many good jobs, progress was still not enough. He reminded that the first job of a being responder should be “first protect yourself” and be prepared. The chief secretary expressed hope that the two-day programme would impart more knowledge and confidence to help people during disaster.
In his opening remark, Brigadier Kuldip Singh, consultant (ME &IRS) NDMA, said any natural or man-made disaster has a potential for immense damages, social and economic havoc, which could have long term effect.
He said a large disaster could wipe away decades of developments, infrastructures etc and would seriously impinge upon any community, state, district or nation’s sustainable development.
Singh therefore said the password for the training should be disaster management accompanied by disaster risk prevention, which both have become politically imperative. He stated that all future infrastructure constructions, whether private or public, should be disaster resistance.
He expressed joy that the IRS has been very capably co-opted in Nagaland and has gone beyond co-opting IRS. Singh said the community responder’s programme, which has already covered 159 villages and expected to expand to 18 villages by end of 2017, was a classic example how NSDMA had worked on.
Addl. Chief Secretary (Home), Temjen Toy also spoke on the occassion while the programme was chaired by commissioner & secretary NSDMA Khrienuo Metha.