THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The US Consulate General in Chennai and Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR), Kochi, in association with the Kerala State Disaster Management Authority launched a series of workshops and awareness-building events titled ‘America with Kerala’ here on Monday. The programme focuses on sharing US and Indian experiences and expertise related to disaster management and community resilience.
Minister for Higher Education K T Jaleel, who inaugurated the workshop that launched a series of ‘America with Kerala’ programmes, said the Kerala Government took all possible measures to handle the situation during the 2018 flood.
“For tackling disasters, we should have a great deal of social commitment, knowledge in emergency response, and finally, technical competence to tackle the issue. Kerala showed great resilience during and after the disaster with its limited infrastructure. I hope ‘America with Kerala’ will bring out innovative ways to tackle disasters,” he said.
Lauren Lovelace, Consul for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy, US Consulate General in Chennai, said: “We believe our recent experiences in the US with our natural disaster management holds relevance for Kerala. Therefore, we are delighted to welcome more than 70 stakeholders - from academics to policymakers to media representatives - to contribute and enrich this workshop and the ‘America with Kerala’ initiative.”
Dr Himanshu Grover, Co-Director of the Institute for Hazard Mitigation and Planning at College of Built Environments, University of Washington, provided a US perspective, saying, “while each disaster event is unique, it is possible to have a common framework for knowledge-building and knowledge-sharing to make disaster management more effective.”
He said more than a hundred universities in the US have disaster management programmes - ranging from certificate programmes to doctoral courses.The common threads these programmes share is the attention towards the role of human development activities, an ‘all-hazards approach’, critical importance of pre-event planning and preparedness, and emphasis on community resilience,” he said.
Dr D Dhanuraj, chairman, CPPR, said: “Through ‘America with Kerala,’ we expect to bring more disaster management experts to the table to equip stakeholders in Kerala with a global perspective.”After the three-day workshop in Thiruvananthapuram, the next phase of ‘America with Kerala’ will be conducted in Kochi (July 23-25) and Kozhikode (August 26-28).
Chief Secretary Tom Jose and V Venu, Principal Secretary, Revenue and Disaster Management, and Rajan Gurukkal P M, Vice-Chairman, Kerala State Higher Education Council, spoke on the occasion.
