Excelsior Correspondent
SRINAGAR, Apr 18: A meeting of experts from various national institutes, working on post-disaster Uttarakhand under Mapping Your Neighbourhood in Uttarakhand (MANU) project was held at KU under the chairmanship of Prof Talat Ahmad, VC, Kashmir University.
Government of India has sanctioned pilot projects under MANU to the leading experts primarily focusing on the post-disaster data collection and analysis about landslides, glacial lake outburst, damages to the built-up infrastructure, communication lines and agriculture crops.
The outcome of the project shall be a perspective and visionary strategy for disaster risk reduction in Uttarakhand and other Indian Himalayan states with similar geological and environmental setting. The perspective plan shall feed into the policy and planning to reduce the risk of the Himalayan states to disasters like the one experienced in Uttarakhand recently.
Prof Talat Ahmad said that there is a need for an S&T driven strategy to develop robust action plans in order to minimize the loss of life and damage to the infrastructure in the event of such a calamity in future.
Dr Bhoopsingh, Director, Deptt of Science and Technology, Govt of India said the MANU project shall not only help in the identification and understanding of the problems in the Himalayan region but also suggest alternate policies for decision makers to solve problems related to the disaster and environmental management in the fragile Himalayas.
Prof Shakil A Romshoo, HoD Earth Sciences, KU, who coordinated the meeting and is reconstructing the disastrous cloudburst and GLOF event in Uttarakhand under MANU, said that it is important to assess the breaching risk of all the glacial lakes in Himalayas and the likely damage it shall cause to the life and property downstream so that appropriate mitigation measures are initiated.
Among others, the meeting was attended by Prof YVN Krishnamurthy, Director, IIRS (ISRO), Dr A K Singh, Principal Scientific Officer, DST, Dr Vinod Bothale, Group Director, Bhuvan (ISRO), Prof Tasavoor Kanth, Dept of Geography, KU, Prof Y Sundriyal, Garhwal University, Prof J S Rawat, Kumaun University, Dr Pradeep Srivastava, Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WIHG), Dr Perumal (WIHG), Dr Vikram Gupta (WIGH), and Dr Harish Karnatak, IIRS (ISRO).
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