Long way to go for proper disaster mitigation: PM

New Delhi (Agencies): India has made encouraging progress in recent years to put in place mechanisms for disaster prevention and mitigation, but there is still a long way to go and local communities must be involved in the effort, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said. Addressing the first session of the National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (NPDRR) here on Monday, the Prime Minister called for greater attention to arrangements for providing funds to people to cope with losses suffered in the wake of natural disasters. "Disaster management is an area of vital national importance to our country, and I believe that the integration of disaster risk reduction strategies into our development initiatives must necessarily involve local communities. We must make full use of our Panchayat Raj institutions to achieve this objective," the prime minister said. He said managing disasters is necessarily a collaborative and complex exercise involving central, state and local governments and civil society organisations and people at large. "I believe that while we have made encouraging progress in recent years in putting in place institutions and mechanisms for disaster prevention and mitigation, we have still a large distance to travel," the Prime Minister said. Referring to the need for effective arrangements for providing funds to people who have suffered losses due to natural disasters, he said: "The current systems, particularly at the national level, lack institutional incentives and do not promote mechanisms such as risk insurance and contingent credit facilities." Noting that the 10th Five Year Plan for the first time emphasised the need to consider disaster risk as a developmental issue, he said the development processes could not be really sustainable without risk mitigation efforts being built into them. He said the 12th Plan focuses on the new developments that had taken place in the area of disaster risk reduction, like early warning systems and communications, and mainstreaming of disaster risk reduction in some of our major development programmes. "For example, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme now includes drought mitigation efforts as an eligible activity allowed to be taken up under the scheme," the Prime Minister said. "The national platform for disaster risk management meets India's commitment to the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction," he said.