PI: Prof Santosh Noronha, Chemical Engineering Department

A major reason that disasters in South Asia result in high numbers of casualties has to do with poor dissemination of disaster alerts. In India, disaster casualties have been consistently high in spite of robust early prediction systems being present. The 2017 deluge claimed 1046 lives while 567 people lost their lives in 2018 floods in India. The evolution of systems for dissemination of early warnings to local communities has not kept pace with the development of forecast technologies. The ‘last mile’ connectivity to the community at risk still depends upon manual systems. Oxfam India has rolled out several humanitarian relief programs in response to floods (most recently in Assam and Bihar) and has approached the Centre, in coordination with TISS, Mumbai, to look into the creation of low cost early warning solutions that are robust and widely deployable in high risk areas. Oxfam India’s need assessment process has identified two early warning system variants – lifeboxes and lifetowers – that they believe will integrate into pre-existing systems. The current proposal intends to assemble the two variants and evaluate them for their efficacy.