A year after the devastating tsu-nami of December 26, 2004, India is moving to put in place its very own tsunami-warning system, for which the government insists it will not use overseas help and which will be ready with no time and cost overruns by September 2007.Last year, 240,000 people lost their lives to the catastrophic wave, 15,000 in India alone. The worst affected regions of the country were the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the southern Indian coasts skirting the Bay of Bengal.The government gave formal approval for the Rs 125 crore plan in October and has allocated Rs 20 crore for use in the current financial year. Under the ambitious plan, India will install tsunami warning sensors close to the ocean floor at appropriate locations in the Indian Ocean with real-time connectivity and will create a network of tide gauges and data buoys to determine the time when tsunami waves could hit land.‘‘The Indian system is the best system for our country,’’ says Union Minister for Science and Technology and Ocean Development Kapil Sibal, who asserts that ‘‘there is no assistance being taken from foreign firms in this regard’’.The 24/7 tsunami early warning centre will be housed at the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad, and will be a multi-hazard monitoring point that will also look at the storm surges that develop due to cyclones.To bolster already-existing monitoring networks through a multi-institutional approach, the Indian government wants, over the next two years, to augment the 12 online tide gauges with 50 more, of which eight are now online. It also plans to hike the number of seismic stations from 51 to over 170, with 17 of them being broadband online stations. The first such station was commissioned in May 2005 at Port Blair on the notorious Andaman-Sunda fault.India will also install 10 to 12 tsunamimeters, or Deep Ocean Assessment and Reporting of Tsunami (DART) data buoys—each costing around Rs 1 crore—in the deep waters of the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the southern Indian Ocean. Talks are on with US and Italian firms for these buoys. The National Institute of Ocean Technology, Chennai, is already on the job.India’s objective is to bring down the time taken for assessing earthquake parameters from the current 40 minutes to 10 minutes. Suitable numerical models and inundation scenarios are being developed at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa. This is a vital exercise since warnings will be issued based on the findings of these scenario generators.Some regions that may remain vulnerable in spite of all these major efforts will be the coasts of Gujarat and Maharashtra, including Mumbai. As these are situated very close to the notorious Makran fault near Pakistan, there will be virtually no lead time should a temblor strike. The other area that may not reap major benefits from the early warning system are the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, since they sit directly on top of what can only be called the eastern ‘Ground Zero’ for tsunami generation.What might slow the pace of India’s steady efforts to prepare early warning systems, could well be the lack of data on undersea topography. To undertake what is technically called a bathymetric survey, a very large-scale mapping of the sea floor has to be undertaken at the earliest. But it is no small exercise and things are already lagging, say Indian oceanographers.The process of tsunami evaluation is well laid-out. The national seismic data analysing facility at the India Meteorological Department in Delhi will keep the Hyderabad centre informed. To facilitate faultless communication, a mirror station is being established in Hyderabad. Whenever a tsunamigenic earthquake is detected, this Hyderabad centre will inform the control room of the National Disaster Management Authority in Delhi about possible tsunamis.All this will happen within a matter of minutes says Prem Shanker Goel, space technologist and secretary, Department of Ocean Development. He adds that India’s tsunami warning will not sound every time an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 or above strikes (this is the practice at the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre and results in 75 per cent of the warnings turning out to be false). Goel says to minimise false warnings, alarms bells will ring only when a tide gauge or a tsunamimeter actually records a surging wave. ‘‘You see,’’ he explains, ‘‘India is very unforgiving of people who issue false warnings.’’Tomorrow: Why India will not join the Indian Ocean rim tsunami warning network
