Disaster Management Plan

Disaster management has been an evolving discipline particularly in India over last one decade.
With increasing frequency and intensity of disasters and large number of people coming in their way,
the subject needs a more systematic attention and a planned approach.
National disaster management Act, 2005 provides mandate for development of comprehensive
disaster management plan at national, state and district level. In particular, there is a need to have a
comprehensive plan at district level which is the cutting edge level for implementation of all policy
guidelines and strategies.
A lot of efforts have been going on for development of plans at different levels by different
agencies. In the absence of standard framework and process guidelines, the early experiments with
development of district disaster management plan have been very useful to build experience and
validate it from the direct application during disasters. There is a lot of variation in the existing plans
and the analysis of existing plans shows different plans has different strengths. They act as good source
of information about the district collected in one place and is a rich source of knowledge on aspects of
disaster management in the country. However, these documents largely remain limited to knowledge
and information manuals rather than practical action plans for the stakeholders. Further, since there
have been little involvement of stakeholders in development of these plans, there has been little
awareness about them and it remained as an administrative document, rarely used in pre disaster or
post disaster situation.
There has also been a significant change in our understanding of disaster management from
Global to grassroots levels in last few years. Hyogo Framework for Action and later National Disaster
Management Act in 2005 brought a paradigm shift in disaster management from a reactive relief
based approach to a more proactive disaster risk reduction approach. The evolving understanding of
the subject of disaster management, lessons learnt from the existing plans and the mandate provided
by National Disaster Management Act, 2005 to DDMA’s to develop comprehensive disaster
management plan provides an excellent opportunity to develop some modal plans and a standard
process for development of district disaster management plans for replication in different parts of the
country.
Sphere India, National Coalition of Humanitarian Agencies in the country, in collaboration with
DDMA, SDMA initiated the process to develop a Disaster Management plan for Bandipora district of
Jammu and Kashmir.

Updated District Disaster Management Plan of District Bandipora for the Year 2019