ICT enabled Early Warning Dissemination System for Disaster Management

Natural disasters pose major threats and challenges to many parts of the country. Providing timely and appropriate assistance to people directly impacted by the crisis is an extremely challenging task, given the growing needs of the people and the increasingly complex nature of the crisis. Technology developments in humanitarian assistance are viewed as allowing the specific goals to be achieved and challenges to be tackled. Eventually, technological advancement in humanitarian assistance is multidimensional as it is approached, interpreted, and experienced differently by the key parties. The disaster management framework was one-way communication in the previous period by which authorities gathered information from various sources including past experiences to analyze and circulate warnings over television, radio, short messages to people in the target area. The data input from the remote sensors became more reliable and timely with the advent of ICT and made the analysis more precise and detailed. An effective early warning disaster system is a requirement and a critical component of the response to the disaster. This is important for civilians to provide early notice in the event of disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcano eruptions, flash flooding, landslides, cyclones, and so forth. Early Warning also serves as a reference point for the mandatory evacuation and response to a timely implementation decision by individuals and respective government authorities. This paper outlines how “L&T Smart World's” early warning system helped to evacuate 1.2 million people when cyclone “FANI” which hit the coastal areas of Odisha in India during April 2019.