Social Impact Summit: India shifts focus to disaster resilience and mitigation

India is moving away from a focus on only disaster response and relief towards disaster mitigation and resilience, said Sudarshan Suchi, chief development officer at Reliance Foundation, at a timely discussion on 'Rebooting Development for Disaster Resilience'.

The shift away from the emergency response approach includes preventing or reducing the worst impacts of disasters through better risk-informed planning, as well as enhancing the capacity of communities to cope with and recover from natural hazards, Suchi said. Reliance Foundation has a large disaster management programme working across several states. Increasingly, "all of our initiatives will be community-led," Suchi said.

Technology is aiding that shift, said Samhita R, co-founder and CEO of Resilience360, a startup that offers AI-powered climate risk management solutions. Using large language models, its software can provide quick, hyperlocal risk assessments. That, she said, can help people make risk-informed decisions and "future-proof communities".