Coalition on resilient infra to meet amid Covid challenge in disaster mgmt

When disasters strike in the times of Covid-19, the challenge for disaster managers increases manifold. In the last one year, India was hit by three cyclones in its coastal areas while Uttarakhand faced a tragedy as recent as February. Learning from its experiences, New Delhi would be hosting the annual conference of International Coalition of Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) from March 17-19.
 

To be addressed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the conference would be attended digitally by prime ministers of Britain, Fiji and Italy. “We expect 900 participants and are looking at a whole lot of issues around resilient infrastructure including those of policy, sectoral focus, technical issues, etc,” said Kamal Kishore, member, National Disaster Management Authority.
 

CDRI has 22 member countries and 6 international organisations of which four are multilateral agencies and two private sector networks. The Indian chapter of CDRI plans to take findings of cyclone Fani that hit Odisha in 2019 during which there was a loss of about $1.4 billion of which 40 per cent was in the power sector. “We are looking at how in future, the power sector infrastructure can be built better. We also are going to take findings of that work to other countries so that they can be better prepared in saving lives and infrastructure,” said Kishore.
 

Apart from its focus on power and telecom infrastructure, CDRI is also developing an airport risk index based on their exposure, vulnerability and adaptive capacity. Airports will be classified based on the index.
 

The conference is planned to include other sets of activities like launch of global knowledge project, a fellowship for Indians and other member countries.
 

On being asked whether CDRI has concentrated on cyclones alone, Kishore said their focus was multi disaster. “A large number of CDRI members are impacted by cyclones. For instance, Fiji approached us. We are looking at how hazards come together and inter-connect and exasperate the impact,” he added.
 

When there is no pandemic, people in a disaster area are mostly safe since the cyclone has passed but in this case they are exposed to the virus. “Normally, we have two cyclones but last year we had three in the middle of a pandemic. That really compounded the problem and the challenge of saving lives. You have to design special gear for them. There are a whole range of things that you have to do when a range of hazards come together,” said Kishore.
 

The conference will have sessions on health and digital infrastructure. CDRI has collaborated with the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction and International Telecommunication Union on the resilience of digital infrastructure. “Digital infrastructure has kept the world going in the last one year. It has also been used for office work and telemedicine. Suppose there is an undersea cable, which is impacted, so how do we see there is enough redundancy in the system which acts as a back-up. We need telecom infrastructure such as towers that are designed to withstand the impact of wind. Data centres that are secured and they can survive disaster,” he added. One of the key issues is to have telecom centres that have enough power back so that if there is an outage there is enough power available to run the systems.