Rahat Vani Center for Early Warning of Disaster | 04 Jan 2024

Why in News?

Recently, the state chief secretary Durga Shankar Mishra inaugurated ‘Rahat Vani Center’ (RVC), a disaster early warning center as a part of an effort to deal with multi-hazard scenarios in the state.

Key Points

• The RVC’s function would be to prepare and predict warnings, timely delivery of relief so that compensation to employees could be streamlined.
• The RVC will be Setup at Lalbagh area in Lucknow, with a team of six personnel.
• It will coordinate with India Meteorological Department (IMD), Lucknow; Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune; ISRO's National remote sensing applications; Indian Institute of Information Technology, Lucknow; National Disaster Management Authority and National Institute of Disaster Management to develop a unified disaster risk management stack and efficient technological environment.
• The idea behind RVC is to alert the general mass about possible natural disasters, within 30 minutes to one hour prior to its effect. The information will be disseminated at community level via SMS alert, mobile notification and other ways.
• Currently 68 Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) and 132 Automatic Rain Gauge (ARG) stations of IMD provide weather related alerts in the state.
  • To further strengthen the early warning system, the state government and IMD, are installing five doppler radars (long-range weather forecasting and surveillance), 450 AWSs and 2000 (ARG) stations.