Few months back, I received a call my
friend Professor Kavi Arya from IIT Bombay for being a co-faculty for a workshop
on disaster management he was organizing in Bhutan. Kavi’s team also included Dr.
Vinod Menon, Founder Member of NDMA (National Disaster Management Authority) of India. Bhutan workshop gave me enough opportunity interact with Vinod and pick
his brains on disasters. And sure enough, Vinod poured his insights and wisdom
on various types of disasters from earthquakes to fires, frequency and ferocity
with which disasters strike, relief measures and most important Indian
expertise in disaster management. I also learnt that minimising life and property
loss through early warning systems is critical. Government spends a lot of
money on relief but smarter way would be prevention. We have witnessed fury of
nature in this monsoon season. And the phenomenon is global. Summer in Northern
hemisphere has been severe.
Vinod classified into floods, Landslide, Glacier Lake Out Floods (GLOFs), earthquakes,
windstorms, forest fires, epidemics & biological disasters. Disasters today are result of climate change caused
by massive human mistakes as well as shortsighted approaches by people coupled
with laxity of city managements as was evident in water flooding witnessed in
Pune recently.
I understood that sensors (vibration, sound, thermal, magnetic
radio and more) a couple with early warning systems are key to building
technology and systems to monitor manage and mitigate losses from disasters. Presence of Dr. Samit Sen of IITB, an expert on Geo Spatial technologies, Raghu Iyer of Nevis Networks, one of the few who work on electronics hardware and of course Kavi a computer science expert ensured that we conceptualised what can be called as the strawman of technologies for early warning systems for disasters.
Being an entrepreneur and part of TiE, I started looking for opportunities for entrepreneurs build systems to help Disaster Management. I am glad that FutureTech an industry vertical oriented conference
by @TiEPune on Oct 18-19, 2019 has a special track on Disaster Management. The
conference should open the door for entrepreneurs to leverage this massive
opportunity.
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