Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday said that the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and other agencies need to ensure that the alerts related to disasters reach to the remotest part of the country in time and this will be possible only by engaging all agencies to disseminate information. Special attention should be given to cases of lightning strikes where time is less and the accurate warning alert must reach up to the village level quickly, he added. In his address at at the two day annual conference on capacity building for 'Disaster Response 2022', organised by the NDRF with representatives of various Central and state disaster response forces, Shah said that there are many mobile applications for a variety of disasters but a definite mechanism should be made so that the alerts reach in time to the remotest location.
"The NDRF should make sure that the alerts generated for an impending disaster reach the intended location, village and panchayat in time," he said. He said that many initiatives have been taken by the Central and state governments and so far, SDRFs have been constituted in 26 states and Union Territories. "We have achieved this success while respecting the federal structure. So far, more than 21,000 SDRF personnel have been trained." He said that so far, 32 guidelines have been made, out of which eight have been made in the last two and a half years. He also said that wherever the information or alerts went, the states have worked to implement the pre-deployment principle and 12 battalions of NDRF always stand shoulder to shoulder with the states and State Disaster Response Force(SDRF). "To take it further down, work has been done to implement Aapda Mitra Scheme in 350 districts, which aims to generate more than one lakh youth volunteers. No village should be left where a contingent of youth is not trained by it, no city ward should be left where a contingent of youth is not trained in all disciplines of disaster prevention," Shah said.