At a review meeting held today, concerns were expressed over spurt in lightning strikes with an experts panel formed comprising officials of Odisha State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) and Special Relief Commissioner (SRC) office.
Revenue and Disaster Management Minister Maheswar Mohanty informed that, Odisha has registered a steep hike in casualties due to lightning strikes as on average 400 people are being killed annually.
The casualties are much more compared to other states with a total of 2,000 deaths being reported in the country every year. So far, 258 persons have been killed in separate lightning strike incidents in Odisha this year.
Official sources said, Odisha government has now decided to conduct a detailed study and analysis of the postmortem reports of the persons killed in the natural disaster.
Over 45 persons have been killed in the past fortnight while three fresh deaths were reported from Bhadrak yesterday.
Also Read Lightning toll reaches 40 in State
Special Relief Commissioner (SRC) Bishnupad Sethi said that apart from postmortem reports, a detailed analysis will be done regarding the timing of deaths, place whether urban or rural areas so as to chalk out a comprehensive strategy.
As per available statistics, lightning incidents are more frequent from May to August and such incidents are more in coastal belts in the state, said Sethi adding that massive awareness drives will also be conducted in several parts of the state.
A decision to this effect was taken at the third Agriculture Cabinet meeting presided over by chief minister Naveen Patnaik at the State Secretariat here today.
Briefing media persons after the meeting, chief secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi said as per the NSSO (National Sample Survey Organisation) statistics available from 2003 to 2013, Odisha is the first state in the country where the average monthly income of the farmers has been doubled. As against the all India average increase in income of farmers which is 34 percent, Odisha has posted 108 percent increase”, Padhi said.
He said in 2003, the average monthly income of the farmers in Odisha was Rs 1000 which has gone slightly over Rs 2000 in 2012-13.
“The meeting discussed about the steps to further double the income of the farmers in the next five years. To achieve the target, the state government will make the irrigation network more intensive and expedite mega lift irrigation projects. It has been planned that there will be 10-15 mega lift irrigation projects in each of the 17 clusters of the state in the next five years. Apart from this, considering that Odisha is behind some states in terms of water usage efficiency, the meeting decided to increase efficiency to ensure more agriculture productivity,” Padhi pointed out.
At present, wastage of water is on higher side than usage of water in Odisha, he added.
To ensure constant flow of water, the state government will expedite repair of canal which are not functioning at present. Besides, emphasis will be given on bore well scheme. There was a target to energise 12,000 bore wells this year of which 6500 bore wells have been energised so far. Efforts will be made to energise the remaining bore wells in next 4-5 months, the chief secretary said.
He also informed that the state government is trying to investment more in Animal Husbandry and Fishing sectors. “The state government has already formulated new policy for these two sectors. A state level committee has been formed under the chairmanship of the Development Commissioner whose responsibility will be to improve the performance of different sectors of Agriculture. The committee has secretaries of Finance, Agriculture, Water Resources, Energy and Panchayati Raj as the members. The committee will monitor the creation of irrigation potential and closing the gap between the potential created and utilised. It will have a review meeting in every month and submit a report to the Agriculture Cabinet,” Padhi said.
He said the chief minister directed the concerned minister to commission a 5-lakh litre capacity plant of Odisha Milk Federation (OMFED) near Barang on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar within two years.
The chief secretary also informed that the state government will form a Drought Management Cell for the Odisha Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) which will provide advance information regarding drought to the government and the farmers. “Through this process, there will be more installation of automatic weather stations rain gauges throughout the state. This will help the state government to get advance information on weather and rainfall and effectively use the satellite data for drought management,” he said.
The chief minister informed the meeting that from being a rice deficit state in 2000, Odisha has now become the third largest contributor of rice to the public distribution system (PDS) in the country. “The chief minister also gave direction to give more efforts to further increase agriculture productivity in the state which will benefit the farmers,” the chief secretary said.
The meeting also revealed that the state government has sanctioned about Rs 800 crore towards crop insurance. Besides, the Centre has also released its crop insurance share. “Put together, we will disburse about Rs 1700 crore odd pending crop insurance of the farmers since last year within a few days,” Padhi said.
Talking to media persons after the governing body meeting of the OSDMA presided over by chief secretary Aditya Prasad Padhi at the State Secretariat here on Saturday, Special Relief Commissioner (SRC) Pradipta Kumar Mahapatra said that the state government has entrusted OSDMA to prepare a protocol on drought since Odisha is affected by drought every 3-4 years.
“Since the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) usually provides monsoon forecast during May and June, we will plan well in advance to make sure the situation does not aggravate in October and November. The protocol would be jointly prepared by the departments like the Panchayati Raj, Water Resources, Rural Development, Agriculture etc., who are associated with the OSDMA, during the monsoon months if there is a forecast of deficient rainfall,” he pointed out.
He said if there deficit rainfall is forecast for specific areas with no possibility of raising crops, the government need not wait for crop cutting to announce that there is crop loss.
“We should plan much in advance and start supplying seeds to the farmers without waiting till October and November. After observing the monsoon trend in the first three months, we would take action well in time. The protocol will fix the timing of our action plan,” Mohapatra said.
The SRC said the protocol would be of much help to the concerned departments who would take up labour-intensive programmes if there is deficit rainfall.
“As soon as the dry spell starts, the departments will start labour-intensive programmes and provide jobs to the labourers,” he added.
About the preparation of the protocol, Mahapatra said it would be done in the OSDMA office since he is in charge. “Any planning is done in the OSDMA. The duty of the SRC is to warn people before and after a natural disaster,” he pointed out.
He said among other things, it was decided that henceforth the cyclone shelter management committees will be headed by the sarpanches to look after its maintenance. Earlier, the Block Development Officers (BDOs) were the presidents of the committees.
There are a total of 850 cyclone shelters in the state at present.
Apart from this, the meeting also approved the decision taken at the state executive committee meeting of the OSDMA for formation of 10 additional Odisha Disaster Rapid Action Force (ODRAF) units in the state which will become operational from April 1 this year.
“Since the Home department has confirmed the selection of 500 personnel as the members of the new ODRAF units, we will provide all equipment and funds to the Additional DG, ODRAF as per the requirement,” Mahapatra said.
According to Special Relief Commissioner P K Mohapatra, a state-level empowered committee meeting, chaired by Chief Secretary A P Padhi, has sanctioned Rs 70 crore for the purpose.
He said 10 units had been created about a decade ago and with the addition of 10 more such units, any emergency situation can be tackled.
Padhi also directed the Odisha disaster management committee to improve the efficiency of the fire officers and block level officers.
It was also decided to install rain forecast and weather forecast equipments at blocks and panchayat level.
Padhi also instructed the officials to link the information received from these systems with the crop insurance system.
Earlier, it was decided to set up three fire fighting forces and allocate Rs eight crore for purchasing 15 varieties of equipment, SRC Mohapatra said.
It also decided to set up Early Warning Dissemination System in the coastal districts by April, 2017. There will be 122 automatic alarm systems along 480 km-long coast through the project, Padhi said.
"The project will warn people, residing in the coastal regions, about tsunami, flood and cyclone directly from the State Control Centre," Mohapatra said.
A total 600 new automatic rain and weather forecasting equipments will be installed for drought management in the state, the SRC said adding at present around 502 such equipments have been installed.
He said that a proposal was also placed to increase the number of cyclone shelters. The proposal is for adding 100 more flood-cum-cyclone shelters. The state is already equipped with 1,500 cyclone shelters.
These houses should have water and electricity supply besides community centres and road connectivity.
The administration had targetted to construct 16,707 houses in 107 villages in Chhatrapur, Chikiti, Rangeilunda, Ganjam and Khallikote blocks. Of them, work on 8,519 houses have been completed, an official said.
The progress of the project was reviewed by Managing Director of OSDMA, P K Mohapatra with the administration at Chhatrapur recently. Sources said only 3,248 of the 8,519 houses have power supply now.
The district received around Rs 445 crore under the project, of which Rs 404 crore was spent. While Rs 380 crore was disbursed among beneficiates for construction of the houses, the rest amount was meant for building approach roads and water supply projects, etc, said a senior officer.
Like India Awas Yojana (IAY), the project is a beneficiary-driven and the amount would be paid in phases to the beneficiaries, he said.
While the cost of each house is around Rs 3 lakh, the government also provides Rs 12,000 to each beneficiary for construction of toilet under the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, sources said.
While 465 lightning deaths were recorded in Odisha during the year 2017-18, it came down to 320 in 2018-19 which is about 31 per cent decline in rate of human casualty, said Special Relief Commissioner (SRC) B P Sethi.
The SRC said 401 people died due to lightning in the year 2015-2016 and in 2016-17 the figure was 400, the SRC said.
Asked about the reason behind the decline in lightning deaths, Sethi said the office of the SRC and Odisha Disaster State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) has taken a number of steps to arrest the increasing trend of lightning deaths in the state.
The campaign includes making people aware about the lightning hazard and the safety measures for saving lives from such incidents.
A MoU have been signed between the Special Relief Commissioner-cum-Managing Director, OSDMA on behalf of the Odisha government and the Earth Networks of the USA to get the advance information about the upcoming lightning with a view to alerting the citizens to enable them to take the required precautionary measures for saving their lives.
The Earth Networks has set up six lightning sensors across Odisha and is providing information on a regular basis to OSDMA about probable lightning incidents, 30-40 minutes in advance, along with the map briefly showing the area where lightning is likely to strike, he pointed out.
The information with map thus received from Earth Networks is quickly processed on GIS platform in OSDMA and the geographic coordinates of the probable area of lightning strike is communicated to the state emergency operations centre for sending SMS alerts to the people of that area through Location Based Alert System (LBAS).
The SMS alerts are sent through LBAS to the people who are present in the area likely to be affected by the lightning strike.
"The entire operations from receipt of the information from earth networks till despatch of the SMSes are completed in 2-3 minutes. The state emergency operations centre is functioning in the office of the Special Relief Commissioner," Sethi said.
OSDMA has also collaborated with the Regional Integrated Multi-Hazard Early Warning System for Africa and Asia (RIMES), Thailand for developing an integrated Decision Support System (DSS) for providing real time watch, alert, and warning information for different hazards like heat wave, lightning, droughts, ocean state information and floods.
Meanwhile, the OSDMA has developed an application "SATARK" (System for Accessing, Tracking and Alerting Disaster Risk Information Based on Dynamic Risk Knowledge). The citizens are downloading this app and using the same to get early alerts about lightning incidents, he said.
Apart from the above, an intelligent and automated system known as 'Outdoor Alerting System' has been installed in 14 most lightning vulnerable blocks of the state for quickly disseminating the warning to citizens.
The siren installed in this system will automatically blow before approach of any lightning and severe weather, which will be audible to the people in the vicinity. People getting such siren alerts may inform others through different modes. The system will be expanded in future, Sethi said.
Official sources said about 85 per cent of total deaths due to lightning occur during the months of May to September.
The decision in this regard was taken at a meeting chaired by OSDMA managing director B P Sethi and attended by civil society organisations and officials of the department of Social Security and Empowerment of Persons with Disability on Tuesday.
"The cell will operate at the OSDMA taking into consideration the special needs and vulnerability of the persons with disabilities and mainstreaming their needs into disaster management," Sethi said.
He said the cell would look into special needs of persons with disability during evacuation, search, rescue operations, rehabilitation and resettlement during natural calamities like flood and cyclone.
The cell will make networking with both the government and private organisations and prepare a data base of persons with disabilities and organisations in the state working with such persons and prepare plans accordingly, he said.
It was also decided that all the multipurpose cyclone and flood shelters would be made disable friendly by the cell
The meeting also resolved that the evacuation and search and rescue response forces like ODRAF, NDRF, Red Cross, Civil Defense and Community level task force volunteers would be given training on special care to handle such persons.
Bishnupada Sethi, who was serving as the SRC, has been posted as Energy Department Secretary with additional charge as CMD of Odisha Hydro Power Corporation (OHPC).
Mona Sharma currently posted as principal secretary of Rural Development Department has been appointed principal secretary of Forest and Environment Department.
As per the notification, Sanjeev Chopra has been appointed principal secretary of the Home Department. He has also been given additional charge as principal secretary of GA and PG department.
Saurabh Garg, the current principal secretary of the Agriculture department will assume additional charge as CMD of GRIDCO and OPTCL and CEO of OCPL.
Chairman-cum-managing Director, GRIDCO, Hemant Sharma has been appointed Commissioner-cum-Secretary of the Industries department with additional charge as Commissioner-cum-Secretary of MSME department and CMD of IPICOL.
Chithra Arumugam, Special secretary P&C department has been appointed Commissioner-cum-secretary of School and Mass Education Department.
Arvind Agarwal, who is currently posted as Director Social Welfare with additional charge of MD Mahila Vikas Samabaya Nigam, has been given additional charge as secretary of GA and PG department.
Water Resources Department Special Secretary, Vishal Gagan has been given additional charge as Commissioner-cum-Secretary of the same department.
Odisha, which has come a long way since the 1999 Super Cyclone, has now become a "model state" in disaster preparedness and risk mitigation, OSDMA Managing Director B P Sethi said.
The "SATARK" (System for Assessing, Tracking and Alerting Disaster Risk Information based on Dynamic Risk Knowledge) has been chosen for the award, he said.
Sethi said the application, both in web and mobile, has been developed in the state to provide real time watch, alert and warning information for different natural disasters and hazards such as heat wave,lightning, agriculture risk, flood, tsunami,earthquake, cyclone or storm, road accident and snakebite.
"We give different level of warnings and issue corresponding advisories based on the event scenario. It is available both in Odia and English languages," Sethi said.
Express Computer IT Excellence Awards are given to organisations or government departments that demonstrate innovative use of IT technology for providing benefits to the public.
Express India has invited Sethi to receive the award at Bombay Exhibition Centre in Mumbai on September 18.
"Five member countries namely Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Nepal will participate in the exercise.
However, Bhutan and Thailand are not participating in the exercise," NDRF chief S N Pradhan and OSDMA MD P K Jena told reporters here on Monday.
Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik will inaugurate the event here Tuesday, while Union Minister of State for Home Nityananda Rai will launch the field training exercise on February 12 at Ramchandi Beach in Puri district, they said.
The three-day-long exercise will consist of the inaugural session and tabletop exercise (TTx) on the collapsed structure in Bhubaneswar.
The field training exercise (FTx) on aquatic disaster response with a focus on cultural heritage sites to be held at Ramnchandi beach followed by proceeding of disaster management exercise and policy meeting of NDMA/NDMOs among the teams of participating nations on February 13, they said.
The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) is hosting the '2nd BIMSTEC Disaster Management Exercise-2020' with the theme "A cultural heritage site that suffers severe damage in the earthquake and flooding or storm" at Bhubaneswar and Puri.
The objective of the exercise is to test the existing emergency procedures for notification, preparedness and emergency response, during a major earthquake and flood scenarios. This exercise will also provide an opportunity to enhance the coordination and cooperation involving multi-agency operations in an earthquake, flooding and storm surge, they said.
Asked about the selection of Odisha as its venue, Pradhan said: "Odisha has been selected in view of the state's experience and success in tackling disasters in the past and also because it has a number of heritage sites".
(PTI)
Through the State Level Bankers' Committee (SLBC) Convenor, the regulator directed the Controlling Heads of the Banks operating in the State to ensure that their respective banks follow the norms and sanitise the ATM counters everyday with the help of the security guards for containment of the novel Coronavirus.
Also Read: Coronavirus Pandemic Needs Collective Action: Odisha Governor
"Odisha State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) volunteers will inspect the ATM counters and report any violation in this direction, which will be viewed seriously. The ATMs should also be kept open with sufficient cash to avoid rush in the bank counters" the department said.
The detailed advisory for banks is as follows:
State Finance Department issues advisory for banks operating in #Odisha to implement these guidelines to prevent #COVID2019 #CoronavirusOutbreak pic.twitter.com/YGKiShaqve
— OTV (@otvnews) March 18, 2020
The positive news so far is Odisha government's COVID-19 spokesperson Subroto Bagchi while addressing a presser today informed that out of 47 samples, 46 have tested negative and the condition of the lone person tested positive is stable.
Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has put partial restriction on running of various local markets in the capital city Bhubaneswar in the wake of Coronavirus outbreak. The markets will now function from 6 am to 6 pm till March 31, an order of the BMC stated.
BMC observed that major markets under its jurisdiction get packed with uncontrollable crowd, which is in contrast to the SOPs for daily markets/Haats and also varies with the social distancing protocol issued by the Government of Odisha.
To contain the possibility of spread of the COVID-19 due to large congregation in the market place, the Civic body has ordered that Unit-I daily market/Haat, Unit-II market, Saheed Nagar daily market, Ruchika daily market, Old town daily market, Indradhanu daily market and Damana Haat shall function from 6 am to 6 pm with effect from March 19.
Also Read: Coronavirus Rumour-Mongers Arrested In Odisha
Zonal Deputy Commissioners may assess the position of other daily, weekly markets, haats apart from the aforementioned six prominent markets and submit a proposal for similar order. The SOP communicated for daily market, haats earlier is to be followed scrupulously, said BMC.
In another major development, Odisha Public Service Commission (OPSC) has postponed all its exams for an indefinite period for the welfare and safety of candidates amid the corona crisis.
Following a collective decision of the zonal railways, the platform ticket price has been temporarily increased from Rs 10 to Rs 50 to minimise the footfall at the railway stations. After Western Railway and other zones, East Coast Railway too issued a notification stating that entry to stations is being discouraged by temporarily increasing the price of platform tickets to Rs 50.
While Visakhapatnam station under ECoR has already implemented the enhanced rates, others in the list are Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Vizianagaram, Puri, Srikakulam Road, Bhadrak, Rayagada, Berhampur and Sambalpur.
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