National Integrated Alert System contribution towards disaster resilient India

Protecting lives by disseminating the right information to the right people at right time is the essence of an effective disaster early warning system.

As per the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, India is the third country with the highest human and economic loss owing to natural disasters over the last 20 years (2000-2019). Around 79,732 people have lost their lives and 108 crore people were affected by 321 incidences of natural disasters (like cyclones, heat and cold waves, floods, Tsunamis, etc.) in India in the same duration, according to the International Disaster Database (IDD). India has suffered nearly 80 billion USD in economic losses in the 20 years.

From a disaster management perspective, over the years India has built advanced forecasting mechanisms for disaster events and created robust institutional mechanisms through NDMA, SDMA, NDRF, and SDRF for mitigation of the damage and destruction caused by disasters.

C-DOT has created the Inter-Working Systems (IWS) for legacy technologies of radio, coastal sirens DTH and cable TV, etc. in a cost-effective manner.

Gaps in the System

However, in the existing early warning mechanism, there are some gaps in disseminating the disaster alerts to the citizens present in the targeted disaster impact area so that people can take necessary action to protect themselves from the impact of the disaster.

Some other challenges include addressing odd hours, warnings in vernacular languages, and dissemination over multiple media to ensure reachability. Moreover, there are manual interventions required at different steps to send early warnings to the common public precious time is lost in the manual process. There is a need of adopting a coordinated and automatic approach between various stakeholders of disaster management for effective early warning dissemination.

CDOT Solution

C-DOT is bridging these gaps by implementing pan India level Integrated Alert System known as सचेत (समिेकत चेतावनी तंत्र) for National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA).

The system will integrate and bring all the stakeholders under a common umbrella which will ensure a coordinated and automated approach to sending location-specific disaster alerts to the people of target areas for extreme events like Cyclone, Lightning, Tsunami, Flood over multiple dissemination media (SMS, Cell Broadcast, Radio, Television, social media, Coastal Sirens, Mobile App, RSS Feed, etc.) in Indian vernacular languages.

The alert messages reach the people over different media in such ways that grab attention and help them to take prompt action, for example mobile app produces a distinctive tone upon receiving red alerts it has an auto read-aloud feature also, and an alert message comes as an On-Screen Display (OSD) in TV.

C-DOT has created the Inter-Working Systems (IWS) for legacy technologies of radio, coastal sirens DTH and cable TV, etc. in a cost-effective manner. This system equips the authorities to disseminate and communicate, timely, accurate, and actionable warnings and associated information on the likelihood and impact of a disaster to the common public.

This indigenously designed and developed national-level system will support the vision of the Honorable Prime Minister of self-reliant India “Atmanirbhar Bharat” and also towards the PM’s 10-point agenda for Disaster Risk Reduction. This solution leverages technology for the enhancement of disaster risk management. This will significantly contribute toward fulfilling the country’s goals to achieve a substantial reduction of disaster risk and losses in lives, livelihoods, and health in line with the UN’s Sendai Framework guidelines. With the nationwide rollout of this system, India has become one of the few countries that have achieved deployment of automated multi-hazard multimedia early warning systems.

The system has been successfully rolled-out across India and has been effectively used for sending over 4 billion alert messages during various disaster events like cyclone Asani, Assam, and Gujarat floods, Cyclone Nisarga and Amphan, Cyclone Tauktae and Yaas. Jammu and Kashmir Government has disseminated targeted weather alerts during Shri Amarnath ji Yatra. During the COVID-19 pandemic situation, the service of this system (known as “COVID-19 Sāvdhān”) is being rigorously used by 26 State & Union Territory authorities for sending targeted alerts to the citizens of India related to COVID-19 mitigation measures including alerts on quarantine centres, vaccination information, supply of essential commodities, law and order issues, etc.

This indigenously designed and developed national-level system supports the vision of the Honourable Prime Minister of a self-reliant India and toward the PM’s 10-point agenda for Disaster Risk Reduction.

The Integrated Alert System has generated Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in terms of various patents, research papers in reputed journals, and in form of ITU contributions. For enhancing the capacity of the system, C-DOT is focusing on using Artificial Intelligence (AI) in an early warning by building the data-driven citizen-centric Decision Support System (DSS). This will help disaster managers by performing impact assessment of disaster events through the configuration of decision models and evaluating disaster impact.

By Saurabh Basu, CDOT

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