SMARTER (AEIF Project Proposal)

Purpose and Importance

According to a senior UN official, India ranks second in the world for natural disasters after China. India has experienced mass destruction caused by cyclones, storm surges in coastal regions, earthquakes, serial monsoon flooding, landslides, fire accidents, and industrial disasters.

Increases in population, coupled with the construction of poorly designed structures, subject Indian cities to enhanced levels of risk to life and property loss in the event of disasters writ large. Lack of basic preparedness, substantially increases the damage at a rate of 2% of the country's GDP (World Bank; NDMA).

Today, social media is a hyperactive and accessible platform. Around 33 million Indians use social media and this is bound to grow as 70% of the population takes to mobile internet (Nielsen; Digital Summit 2012). This AEIF project seeks to popularize emergency readiness by innovatively utilizing social media. We aim to use metric based messaging and create communication templates for different emergency scenarios. We will train college students and professionals to use them for emergency preparedness, and operationalize it among the masses.

Objectives

• To sensitize society on the significance and benefits of disaster preparedness

• To engage social media for the first time in India to discuss ways of disaster risk reduction and building community resilience

• To internalize lessons on emergency readiness using metric based messaging and creating customized communication templates

• To popularize disaster preparedness as a socially beneficial process in India

Three model cities in India--Pune, Kolkata, and Chennai--have been chosen to initiate the program in light of their geographical distribution and vulnerability to disasters.

 

Location: 

Three model cities in India—Pune (West India), Kolkata (North-East India), and Chennai (South India)-have been chosen. These cities exhibit disaster vulnerability, are geographically distributed, and represent centers of higher education and information technology. The success stories and lessons learned from the model cities will serve as a framework for other cities and towns. This approach of scalability and replication will prepare society to face a broad range of disasters in tandem with user-friendly, freely available innovative social media devices.

Innovation:

Social media has proven extensively popular in the post-disaster sphere, but this has not carried over into the realm of disaster preparedness. Emergency readiness is a novel concept in India. Thus , this project will be the first of its kind to popularize and create awareness about disaster preparedness and community involvement, and accomplish this task by the innovative use of social media in the following ways:

(i) Metric-based messaging in emergency preparedness initiatives is a new idea. Currently, metrics are primarily used to evaluate communication effectiveness of advertisements. This approach takes metrics from the business world and adapts them to fit the disaster sphere.

(ii) The critical evaluation of social media instruments on their potential impacts in different scenarios of disaster preparedness.

(iii) Customizing social media templates to fit different stages of disaster preparedness and ensure that the message is communicated most effectively.

(iv) Conventional top-down route of information would be replaced by peer-to-peer (P2P) learning

(v) Online competitions to kindle curiosity and ensure participation of the younger generation

(vi) Six workshops in three model cities targeting more than 600 participants

(vii) Popularizing multi-app compatible E- manuals to be disseminated through social media for early warning, information dissemination, evacuation and live processing for earthquakes, tsunamis, floods and fire hazards

(viii) Instigating social movement by applying the workshop outcomes to other cities in India

Anticipated Outcome…

‘community development’ would be integrated with ‘disaster readiness’ and ‘emergency management’ to build disaster resilient communities