Practice Test 15

Disaster management has emerged as a critical function of governance in India, a country that by virtue of its geography, climate, and demographic concentration is exposed to a wide range of natural hazards including floods, cyclones, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, heatwaves, and tsunamis that periodically cause enormous loss of life and property and set back the development gains of communities and regions. The Disaster Management Act of 2005, enacted in the wake of the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of December 2004 that killed over eighteen thousand people along India's eastern coastline, created a comprehensive legal and institutional framework for disaster risk reduction, preparedness, response, and recovery, establishing the National Disaster Management Authority under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister as the apex body responsible for laying down policies and plans for disaster management throughout the country. The National Disaster Response Force, established under the Act with fourteen specially trained battalions drawn from central paramilitary forces, provides the country with a dedicated professional capacity for search and rescue operations, medical first response, and humanitarian relief in affected areas, and its personnel are trained to standards comparable with international urban search and rescue teams, enabling effective deployment in highly complex disaster environments. State Disaster Management Authorities and District Disaster Management Authorities mirror the national institutional structure at lower levels of government, developing local disaster management plans, maintaining inventories of emergency equipment, organising community-level mock drills, and coordinating the response of multiple government departments in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. The Cyclone Warning System operated by the India Meteorological Department has improved dramatically over the past two decades with the addition of Doppler radars, satellite-based remote sensing, and numerical weather prediction models, providing advance warning of seventy-two hours or more for major cyclonic storms and enabling the pre-emptive evacuation of millions of people from low-lying coastal areas before storms make landfall. The improvement in evacuation and preparedness has been so significant that the same category of cyclone that would have killed thousands of people in earlier decades now results in far fewer casualties, a success story in disaster risk reduction that has drawn international recognition. The National Flood Risk Mitigation Project is investing in the strengthening of embankments, the improvement of drainage systems, the real-time monitoring of river levels through a network of flood gauging stations, and the development of flood hazard maps for high-risk areas. Earthquake-resistant construction standards prescribed by the Bureau of Indian Standards and made mandatory in seismic zones three, four, and five are being progressively adopted in new construction to reduce the vulnerability of buildings to earthquake damage. The Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, adopted at the United Nations World Conference in Sendai, Japan, provides the global policy framework within which India's national disaster risk reduction strategies are aligned, emphasising the need to substantially reduce disaster mortality, the number of affected people, direct economic losses, and damage to critical infrastructure over the fifteen-year period of the framework's validity.