Disaster Management Activities in an Indian Engineering Institute: A Case Study of Gharda Institute of Technology

Introduction

Disaster is a sudden unfortunate event or emergency that needs immediate response to minimize the damage and get back to normalcy. The disasters can be classified as natural and man-made. Third one is hybrid and is combination of both, natural and man-made disasters. According to Comfort (2005), a network of the companies, firms, managements that are committed to effective disaster management through continual inquiry, informed response and adaptive to learning new things is far better approach than conventional disaster management through administrative structure (Comfort, 2005). Ethics in disaster management is a topic of discussion and needs to be given due consideration while preparing disaster management policy. Disaster is most of the time a situation that leads to monetary and human casualties so appropriate and fast response to the emergency is the most important aspect of disaster management. In many organizations, the allocation of fund for disaster management is part of the financial planning. The most important aspects of disaster management are cautiousness, bravery, fair-mindedness, watchfulness, toughness, communication and effective implementation of plan (Geale, 2012). While allocating resources to a certain task, the risks and uncertainties involved must be given due consideration (Roland et al., 2010). Findings by Sawalha indicated that the disaster management in academics and society at large still depends on traditional method (Sawalha, 2020). Coping with disruptive challenges has led to human evolution. Changes in the disaster management strategies and methodologies to meet the new challenges have always been the way forward for effective disaster management (O Brian et al., 2010). Disaster preparedness and disaster management are the terms seldom used in the academics and training of the physicians (Guerdan, 2009). Disaster preparedness includes understanding the level of knowledge and legal aspects involved that can overlap with medical and social emergency. Adequate training to medical, communication and incident controllers is an important part of preparedness. Disaster can be looked upon as an imbalance between the availability of resources and the allocation, especially of medical care facilities. It is estimated that in the past quarter century, 3400000 lives have been lost in disasters(Guerdan, 2009). Recent data on Covid -19 indicates that more than 6.5 million peoples have lost their lives due to coronavirus between 2020 to 2022(World Disasters Report, 2022). On the economic front, trillions of dollars have been lost/spend on these disasters.