BENGALURU: The Karnataka State Natural Disaster Monitoring Centre (KSNDMC) along with UNICEF launched Karnataka State Disaster Risk Reduction Road Map (KSDRR) 2025-2030 on the International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction on Monday.
Karnataka is now the fifth state to launch the Disaster Risk Reduction roadmap, following Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Assam.
Noting that the state witnessed around Rs one lakh crore losses in the last five years due to natural disasters, Mullai Muhilan, Director, KSNDMC, said, through the KSDRR, the KSNDMC aims to prevent and tackle these disasters through systematic road map.
“The theme on this day is ‘Fund Resilience, Not Disasters’, and that is why this road map is a framework of existing solutions to reduce and prevent losses by mitigating floods, drought, earthquakes, heat waves and so on.”
Existing tech to tackle natural disasters
Muhilan added, “The road map includes vulnerability profile of Karnataka, DRR developments, initiatives taken in the state, roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders as defined in the National Disaster Management Act 2005, proposed actions and financial arrangements.” The roles and responsibilities, work implementation in the road map are based on three major milestones divided to achieve in five years.
All departments, gram panchayats have prepared disaster management plans with latest data as baseline information. In milestone 2 for the year 2027-28, the road map mentions that the state has to collaborate and partner with various stake holders from local to global level. In milestone 3, for the year 2029-30, it mentions reducing infrastructure damage, human and animal deaths, casualties by 75%.
Muhilan said, “Currently, KSNDMC has applications including Varuna Mitra, dedicated mainly to providing weather forecast to farmers across the state. Similarly, we have Megha Sandesha, a mobile app developed in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science. This app was created to mitigate urban floods and it provides information to various government bodies especially BWSSB, and others. We are still working on this app to provide information and data to BDA, GBA on the areas that might flood in the future. They can use this data before giving clearance to buildings of layouts.”
There are 6,500 telemetric rain gauge stations installed at every gram panchayat, 850 telemetric weather stations installed in taluks, 11 lightning and thunderstorm sensors, 182 water level sensors installed in Bengaluru and three other cities, 14 seismic sensors installed at major dam sites and 6 reservoir water level and 9 stream gauge sensors installed at Krishna Basin.
