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Take a look at the essential concepts, terms, quotes, or phenomena every day and brush up your knowledge. Here’s your knowledge nugget for today.
(Relevance: Disasters form an important part of the UPSC syllabus. CDRI is an initiative by India that positions the country as a global leader in disaster-resilient initiatives. With the increasing occurrence of disasters worldwide, it is essential to be aware of disaster management initiatives.)
Recently, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) conducted a comprehensive study to develop a Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment Framework (DRRAF) for the telecommunications sector. This study was carried out in collaboration with the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), Government of India.
According to CDRI website, “In India, over 58% of the land is vulnerable to earthquakes, 12% to floods, 15% to landslides, and more than 10% to forest fires. Of India’s 7,516 km coastline, nearly 5,700 km is at risk from cyclones and tsunamis. Telecommunications, as a critical infrastructure spanning the entire country, remains highly susceptible to these hazards.”
1. The Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) is an international organisation set up on India’s initiative in 2019. It is a partnership of national governments, UN agencies and programmes, multilateral development banks and financing mechanisms, the private sector, and knowledge institutions that aims to promote the resilience of new and existing infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks in support of sustainable development.
2. In simple terms, CDRI is an attempt to bring countries together to share and learn from the experiences of one another to protect their key infrastructure — highways, railways, power stations, communication lines, water channels, even housing — against disasters.
3. Disaster preparedness and infrastructure creation are largely national endeavours. However, modern infrastructure is also a web of networked systems, not always confined to national boundaries. There are increasing numbers of trans-national and trans-continental highways and railways; transmission lines carry electricity across countries; assets on a river are shared. Damage to any one node can have cascading impacts on the entire network, resulting in loss of livelihoods and disruption in economic activity in places far away from the site of a disaster.
4. To make entire networks resilient is the main thought behind the Indian initiative of CDRI. The platform is not meant to plan or execute infrastructure projects. Nor is it an agency that finances infrastructure projects in member countries. Instead, CDRI seeks to identify and promote best practices, provide access to capacity building, and work towards standardisation of designs, processes and regulations relating to infrastructure creation and management.
5. According to CDRI estimates, every one dollar invested in making infrastructure more resilient in low- and middle-income countries can potentially save losses of over $4 when a disaster strikes.
“Infrastructure is not just about creating capital assets and generating a long-term return on investment. It is not about the numbers. It is not about the money. It is about people. It is about providing them high quality, dependable and sustainable services in an equitable manner.”
– PM Modi
Infrastructure for Resilient Island States
📍One of the major initiatives under CDRI is Infrastructure for Resilient Island States (IRIS) which was launched by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at COP26 in 2021. Small island states are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. As sea levels rise, they face a threat of being wiped off the map. According to CDRI, several small island states have lost 9 per cent of their GDPs in single disasters during the last few years.
📍Infrastructure Resilience Accelerator Fund (IRAF) was announced by CDRI at COP27 in Egypt in 2022. It is established with the support of UNDP and UNDRR to support global action on disaster resilience of infrastructure systems, especially in developing countries and Small Island Developing States (SIDS).
1. In December last year, the Lok Sabha passed the Disaster Management (Amendment) Bill, 2024 that amended the existing Disaster Management Act, 2005. The Act provided a statutory body for disaster management – National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), headed by the Prime Minister, and State Disaster Management Authorities (SDMAs) headed by respective Chief Ministers, to spearhead and implement a holistic and integrated approach to Disaster Management in India.
2. The Disaster Management Act was enacted in the aftermath of the devastating 2004 tsunami. The Act led to the creation of the NDMA, SDMA at the state level, a National Disaster Response Force (NDRF), and a National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) — an institute meant for disaster-related research, training, awareness, and capacity building. The Act was followed by a National Disaster Management Policy in 2009 and a National Disaster Management Plan in 2016.
3. The Disaster Management (Amendment) Bill, 2024 has proposed to set up the Urban Disaster Management Authorities headed by the municipal commissioner. The action was taken to recognises the special requirements of large metropolitan cities that often comprise multiple districts. This can help in having a unified and coordinated approach towards city-level disasters such as urban flooding.
4. The State Disaster Relief Fund (SDRF), which was constituted under the 2005 Act, has now been made mandatory for all states. The Bill provides legal status to the National Crisis Management Committee. The NDMA has been tasked with creating and maintaining a national disaster database containing information on disaster assessments, fund allocations, expenditures, and preparedness and mitigation plans. The Bill also proposes that the NDMA recommend guidelines for minimum standards of relief to be provided to people affected by disasters.
(Source: Explained: Delhi diplomacy to fight disaster, Why India needs to build disaster resilience in its critical infrastructure ,cdri.world, Bill seeks to expand NDMA role, fails to strengthen its status)
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