Subhashis Mittra
Concerned over recent spate of cloudbursts
and landslides in Uttarakhand and Jammu and Kashmir, the Centre is formulating
a strategy to deal with such natural calamities. Union home minister Amit Shah
shared this input with members of Parliaments (MPs) at a meeting of the
parliamentary consultative committee for the ministry of home affairs (MHA) on ‘Disaster
Management and Capacity Building’.
Addressing the meeting, the home minister
said that before 2014, there was a relief-centric approach towards disaster
management, which was changed to a rescue-centric approach by the Modi
government, by changing the approach and strategy. He said that in the last 10
years, many major policy-related and institutional decisions have been taken in
the field of disaster management. He said that the disaster response policy of
the Modi government is based on four pillars—capacity building, speed,
efficiency and accuracy. This has resulted in significant prevention during
disasters—from the 1999 Odisha Super Cyclone that killed 10,000 people to the
2023 Biparjoy in Gujarat and 2024 Dana in Odisha with zero casualties.