About This Course

For long we have been taught that disasters are of two types, natural and man-made. Isn’t it? But very few of us are aware that, according to recent developments based on years of research, it has been proved that disasters cannot be natural?

We are often taught that earthquakes, cyclones are examples of disasters. But imagine if there’s an earthquake and no one is hurt or no buildings are damaged, should we still call that earthquake a disaster? Events like earthquake, cyclones become a disaster when it combines with EXPOSURE and VULNERABILITY to cause loss of life, hurt and injury to people, along with economic loss. But are we trained enough to see a disaster as a combination of factors like hazard, exposure, vulnerability and coping capacity?

Mami Mizutori, Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction of United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) says that “it is a time to say Goodbye to ‘natural’ disaster. A natural hazard becomes a disaster when it combines with exposure and vulnerability to cause loss of life, hurt and injury to people, along with economic loss. Efforts to replace the term “natural disasters” have been underway since the end of the International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction in the ‘90s.” Available on https://www.preventionweb.net

In fact, we use the term ‘disaster’ so casually, but many of us are unaware that the word disaster has a legal definition in India.

Disaster Management (DM), as a subject and a field of practice, has undergone phenomenal changes in the last decade or so. Unfortunately, not much these changes have been implemented or realised in our society. One of the major reason is the fact that there is a lack of awareness about the fundamentals of the subject. It is often said that a single disaster can push back years of hard earned development and yet, we fail to see disaster and development as the two different faces of the same coin.

Realising this evident gap between what we are taught and what is actually understood globally in this continuously evolving field and with an intention to spread awareness so that our society is capable enough to manage disaster risks and not merely manage disasters, the Gujarat Institute of Disaster Management (GIDM) has developed this 5 hours basic course on Disaster Risk Management (DRM).