The Minister of State for Home Affairs Shri Kiren Rijiju Co-chaired a Plenary session on “National and Local DRR Strategies”, along with Paraguay’s Minister for National Emergency Secretariat, Mr. Joaquin Roa and Mayor of Tlalnepantla, Mexico, Ms. Denisse Ugalde Alegría at Cancun, Mexico . Following are the key recommendations made by Shri Kiren Rijiju, while presenting the summary of the session.
- Strategies: The strategies of the national and local Governments should be in alignment, integrated, supportive and supplementary. The policies, legal frame work, directives, and guidelines of the national Government should support the strategies of the local for implementation, enforcement, development planning and mitigation at the local level. What we need is “Globalisation” of strategies.
- Financial resources. The national and local Governments should have their own budgets for DRR. But the additional support should be from national Governments for risk reduction. This mitigation fund should be based on a formula based on risk, population etc. and also should be based on a system to give incentives to the good work done by the local Governments and communities.
- Capacity Building: The local Governments should pro-actively build capacity of the institutions and communities for DRR. The national Government should support capacity building through networking of institutions, technical support, documenting and sharing best practices, up scaling successful projects at local level- decentralisation for DRR cannot be successful unless adequate capacity is built at the local level. Capacity building of women for DRR leadership must be given special emphasis. Further special action to be taken to care for disabled, old aged and children.
A special round table meeting was convened by UN Deputy Secretary General Ms. Amina J. Mohammed, to exchange views on coherence between Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Sendai framework and Paris agreement on Climate Change. Representing India at the meeting, Dr. P. K. Mishra, Additional Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, emphasised that disaster resilient infrastructure is a strategic entry point which will help us not only achieving the targets enshrined in the Sendai framework but also help in achieving SDGs and implement the Paris agreement. India emphasised that there is a need to bring greater focus in investing at the local level. The meeting was also attended by the leaders of 13 countries.
The Indian delegation led by the Minister, held bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the Global Platform with delegations of Mongolia, Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Japan and UNDP. These countries showed their willingness to work closely with India and to share mutual experience and expertise in various areas of DRR.