By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, April 22, 2015 :

The Odisha government on Wednesday included eight state-specific disasters under the State Disaster Response Fund (SDRF) to facilitate fund allocation to provide assistance to the victims of these calamities.

The state executive committee meeting on disaster management chaired by chief secretary G.C. Pati has identified lightning, heat wave, whirlwind, tornado, heavy rain, drowning, boat accident and snake bite to be included under SDRF, an official press release said.

Funds for assistance will be acquired from SDRF as per the recommendations of the 14th Finance Commission. The state government till now has been providing financial assistance from the Chief Minister’s Relief Fund.

The state government had been urging the Centre for inclusion of heat wave and lightning under SDRF as maximum deaths occurred due to them.

The state government will also move the National Disaster Response Force for leveraging more funds under this head.

The chief secretary asked all the district collectors and departments to prepare their Disaster Management Plan for 2015-16 by the end of May 2015.

Pati also emphasised on capacity building activities for mitigating the effects of various disasters and ordered the augmentation of such activities at both the community and departmental levels.

The Odisha State Disaster Management Authority has been declared the nodal agency for capacity building to face such disasters.

It was decided to earmark Rs.4130 crore as SDRF corpus during 2015-2020 as per recommendations of 14th Finance Commission against which the corpus for 2015-16 will be around Rs 747 crore including 75% of Central and 25% of State share.