Uttarakhand: Disaster labs on Cabinet agenda

Amid devastation in parts of Uttarakhand, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs is likely to take up an Rs 600-crore proposal tomorrow to establish a network of 107 laboratories, in the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-13 to 2016-17), for managing epidemics and natural calamities.

The matter is being taken up in the light of widespread damage to life and property in the flash floods and cloudbursts in Uttarakhand.

The proposal has come from the Health and Family Welfare Ministry. The proposal seeks to set up such laboratories in medical colleges, states and different regions to help in increased medical research in view of spread of unknown viral diseases in the country.

The proposal will entail an expenditure of Rs 485 crore by the Centre and the remaining around Rs 162 crore as states' contribution in such laboratories.     

The Department of Health Research under the Health Ministry has proposed a three-tier structure for such labs with establishment of 120 of them in government medical colleges where the teachers will be involved in innovation and research and another 30 at the state-level.     

The state-level labs will have a 75 per cent contribution from the Centre and 25 per cent from states, except for Jammu and Kashmir and hill states, besides northeastern states which will have only 10 per cent contribution.     

The Department of Health research also proposes to set up 10 national level labs at the regional level across the country to help tackle disease control and research. These will be fully funded by the Centre and will have permanent structure and staff.     

At present, there are only two national level labs which handle disease outbreak and research - the National Centre for Disease Control in Delhi and the National Institute of Virology (NIV) in Pune.

	Loss To Human Lives	Cattle Deaths	Houses Damaged	Cropped Area Affected (in mn ha)
2006-07	2,402	4,55,619	19,34,680	7.9
2007-08	3,764	1,19,218	35,27,041	8.5
2008-09	3,405	53,833	16,46,905	3.5
2009-10	1,677	1,28,452	13,59,726	4.7
2010-11	2,310	48,778	13,38,619	4.6

^{Source: Home Ministry as produced in 12th Plan Document}