Uttarakhand Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami urged global experts to develop a comprehensive disaster management mechanism to better face natural calamities like cloudbursts, landslides, and earthquakes in the coming days.
He said the comprehensive disaster management approach has to be based on Sanatana Dharma’s basic principle of treating the Earth as the mother so that the mindless exploitation of natural resources at society’s disposal can be stopped.
“We need to adopt an approach of economic development in sync with the concept of ecological balance,” CM Dhami said, inaugurating the Sixth World Congress on Disaster Management (WCDM) in Dehradun on November 28.
CM Dhami said the natural resources should be utilised for economic development but sustainably so that the ecological balance is maintained. The Sixth Edition of WCMD witnessed the participation of more than sixty countries in more than 50 technical sessions. The mega programme will end on December 1.
CM Dhami said the enriching deliberations at the global conference would help develop an economic growth approach based on ecological balance.
He hoped the forthcoming Global Investors’ Summit in Dehradun from the second week of December would take a cue from the WCDM to promote a practical model of sustainable economic growth for the Himalayan state for others to replicate in due course.
CM Dhami said the stranded workers at Silkyara tunnel would be rescued soon as a dedicated round-the-clock rescue operation was in full swing. He also said Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking updates on the rescue operations on a real-time basis. All the stranded 41 workers were rescued on Tuesday night after 17 days of the nerve-taking situation inside the tunnel.
The Chief Minister said his Government would provide land for a National Institute of Disaster Management and work closely with the Union Government for required approvals for such a dedicated centre of excellence in disaster management studies in the Himalayan State.
CM Dhami said his Government would include chapters on disaster management in the school curriculum to prepare the future generation to better face climate change issues in the coming days.
Sustainable views
The Uttarakhand Government is diligently working to achieve its economic development goals in harmony with the ecology balance, said Sukhbir Singh Sandhu, the state’s chief secretary.
Sandhu said it would be wrong to say that development brings landslides even though they happen due to natural reasons.
“We have experienced an increasing incidence of climate change impact in the past few decades,” said Ranjit Kumar Sinha, Uttarakhand’s secretary in charge of disaster management and rehabilitation.
Sinha said there is a need to learn from our collective experiences, what has worked well and what has not, and protect ourselves in our collective journey into a safe and resilient future.
Durgesh Pant, director general of Uttarakhand Science and Technology Council (UCOST), said the global summit on disaster management in Dehradun is the practical culmination of the Chief Minister’s thought process shared around two years back at Bodhisattva, an e-public dialogue programme.
Pant, the head of the organising committee for WCDM, said the need of the hour is to globally escalate the theme of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) on climate change and sustainable development.
Renowned environmentalist Anil Prakash Joshi said economic development and maintaining ecological balance must be rural-centric to achieve sustainable development goals.
“An urban-centric approach to economic development will not be beneficial to the subject of ecological balance on this earth,” Joshi said.
Admiral Devendra Kumar Joshi, the Governor of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, floated the idea of natural disaster insurance and automated disaster warning alerts in natural calamity-prone areas.
