CHENNAI: The National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) is developing a state-of-art common alerting protocol system (CAPS) with the capability to send out alerts to a large population within 10 seconds and trigger an alarm in the phones of users in the area. The system will be operational by the end of this year.
On the eve of the G20 Third Disaster Risk Reduction Working Group meeting, NDMA member secretary Kamal Kishore said the phase-1 of CAPS was implemented during cyclone Biparjoy in Gujarat, where 32 million messages were sent and zero mortality was achieved.
NDMA member Lt Gen Syed Ata Hasnain said currently the disaster alert response time is about 30 minutes as sending bulk SMS takes a lot of band space. “The SMSes are getting queued. So, in phase-2, we are working on cell broadcasting wherein a loud alarm will be triggered in your phone within 10 seconds for you to take necessary precaution. This will be used for red alerts. We hope to operationalise phase-2 by the end of this year,” Hasnain said.
SA Raman, director of Tamil State Disaster Management Authority, told TNIE that CAPS was put to use last year in Tamil Nadu to issue flood alerts during south west monsoon when lakhs of cusecs of water was released from Mettur dam. “We sent 1.71 crore messages last year using CAPS.”
Hasnain said the test bed for CAPS was Tamil Nadu, which used it to disseminate information at the time of Covid-19. CAPS was implemented by the Center for Development of Telematics (C-DOT) with funding support from NDMA. The project costs Rs 350 crore.
NDMA authorities also said it was working very closely with the Indian Space Research organisation (ISRO) to enable receiving disaster alerts through Indian satellites by making mobile phones NavIC (Indian regional satellite navigation system) compatible.
Only recently, ISRO launched NVS-01, an advanced second-generation navigation satellite operating on L1, L5 and S bands. After 15 years of struggle, India got spectrum allocation from the International Telecommunication Union to use L1 band, a civilian frequency monopolised by the US for decades.
How CAPS works
G20 meet on disaster management to begin today
The G20 Disaster Risk Reduction Working Group, under the Indian Presidency, is set to hold its third and final meeting in Chennai from July 24 to 26. This is the first time that a dedicated working group on Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) has been constituted, signifying India’s commitment to addressing global challenges posed by disasters and climate emergencies, a press release said.