National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) conducted a first-of-its-kind State-level mock exercise on forest fire in Uttarakhand.

Key facts

• The mock exercise, aimed at assessing the efficacy of integrating the preparedness and response mechanisms of the forest department with those of the district administration, has been conducted in collaboration with the State Government.
• The exercise is significant as almost 70 per cent of the State’s geographical area is under forests and incidents of forest fires are commonplace.
• The simulation exercise was conducted simultaneously at multiple locations.
• It includes residential areas adjoining forests, across all 13 districts covering different types of forests and varying degrees of severity of forest fires.
• The exercises were conducted in coordination with various agencies, such as fire, forest, Army, health, police, National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and State Disaster Response Force (SDRF) and civil defense.

National Disaster Management Authority

• An agency of the Ministry of Home Affairs whose primary purpose is to coordinate response to natural or man-made disasters and for capacity-building in disaster resiliency and crisis response.
• NDMA was established through the Disaster Management Act enacted by the Government of India in December 2005.
• 9-member board chaired by the Prime Minister of India. The remainder of the board consists of members nominated based on their expertise in areas such as, planning, infrastructure management, communications, meteorology and natural sciences.
• The day-to-day management of the agency is overseen by the office of the Vice Chair.
• The agency is responsible for framing policies, laying down guidelines and best-practices and coordinating with the State Disaster Management Authorities (SDMAs) to ensure a holistic and distributed approach to disaster management.

Covered on 18 April 2017

Source : Pib

GS III : Disaster and disaster management