The SAARC Regional Workshop on Sharing Best Practices on "Disaster Risk Reduction" concluded, here today. After a four-day intensive interaction through tabletop and joint simulation exercises during the South Asian Annual Disaster Management Exercise (SAADMEx) from November 23-26, 2015, all the 8 SAARC member countries got together to discuss and deliberate upon the best practices on disaster risk reduction. This Regional Workshop was hosted by Government of India and was coordinated by the National Disaster Management Authority and National Institute of Disaster Management, Ministry of Home Affairs.
The Additional Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister of India, Dr. P.K Mishra has inaugurated the Regional Workshop in the morning, today. During his inaugural address, Dr. Mishra stressed upon the need for a more coordinated effort to deal with disasters amongst member countries of the region. He further reinforced that it would be important to systematically invest in disaster risk reduction and preparedness activities and therefore there is an important need to quantify the targets enumerated in the Sendai Framework to achieve greater degree of risk resilience.
This was followed by technical sessions where issues pertaining to best practices on disaster risk reduction and strengthening regional disaster response in the backdrop of Sendai Framework were deliberated in detail by member countries. The member countries appreciated the efforts of Government of India in organising the first exercise of responding to simulated situations jointly by response teams from SAARC countries in the region as well as the conduct of regional workshop, in particular the efforts of National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) and National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) in planning and making them successful and impactful.