Susanta Kumar: spreading disaster preparedness awareness in rural Orissa

My name is Susanta Kumar Sahoo, and I work as a District Project Officer in the Khurda district of Orissa, under the Disaster Management Program (DRM).
My role is to coordinate the work between the district administration and the UNDP DRM team on disaster preparedness related issues.

Preparedness programmmes usually follow a defined model, that I will briefly try to explain.
First of all, we provide orientation to public administration of the block where the awareness campaign is scheduled. The administration needs to select two Nodal Persons (NP) for the DRM programme at block level. NPs then receive training from UNVs at both district and state level.

As a second step, one or more NGOs are selected at block level by the NPto work on the implementation together with the Panchayat Raj.
Selected NGOs go through a three day orientation (done by UNVs), then they can start to implement the awareness programme. Every selected NGO needs to hold monthly meetings with me at block level, to checkprogresses.
NGO and block administration also select volunteers at village level. These volunteers, after a three day training provided by UNVs, will be able to work on the direct implementation of the awareness campaign.

Personally, I have to take care of 9 blocks. That means that an average of twenty days per month of my working time are spent on hte field. I'm looking after 1563 village, represented by Panchayats.

I've been working on this for almost three years and I can say the people are very supportive. They have faced so many natural disasters inthe past that now they can easily recognise how such trainings and programmes can be an important medium for prevention and impact reduction.

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