By IANS,
New Delhi : India will soon come up with disaster management guidelines for industry in order to ensure that managing disasters becomes part of the development process, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) vice chairman Gen (retd) N.C. Vij said Monday.
Speaking at a two-day national conference on ‘Emergency Planning in Industries’ here, Vij said the NDMA will provide the guidelines to Reserve Bank of India (RBI) within two weeks.
“The NDMA is in the process of completing disaster management guidelines for industry which they have to meet before getting clearance of loans from private and public banks. The guidelines will be circulated by RBI,” he said.
He said the disaster resilience audit will be a kind of self-certification on what measures have been taken by the industry to deal with natural and man-made disasters.
The former army chief said that similar guidelines were made mandatory for all central government and state government projects early this year.
“There is need to mainstream disaster management into the development process. Disaster management should be taken into consideration while formulating, appraisal and approval of any infrastructure-related policies, plans and projects,” he said.
The guidelines have been based on recommendations by experts from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
“We have spoken to the finance ministry in this regard and the RBI can even do random checks to see whether the guidelines are being met,” he added.