The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Motorola wireless sets to be installed in 30 villages

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Dec 11, 2007
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Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Motorola wireless sets to be installed in 30 villages

V. Raghavendra

East Godavari among six districts selected

District Collector formally launches the pilot scheme
Four loud speakers, an amplifier will also be installed

Kakinada: The East Godavari district will soon be having a network of Motorola wireless sets installed in 30 coastal villages, which will give instant warnings of cyclones, floods and tsunami. A control room at the collector’s office will be able to disseminate the information without any delay, under the project being implemented as part of the National Disaster Management Plan with financial support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Five other districts, Srikakulam, Krishna, Guntur, Prakasm and Nellore, have also been selected for the project named Early Warning System (EWS).

M/s Linkwell Electronics Private Limited has been awarded the contract to install the wireless sets and it has already completed trials of the EWS by giving a demonstration at the collector’s office by giving sample messages to the fishermen of Bhairavapalem and Uppada villages of Kakinada rural mandal. After the EWS becomes fully functional, the district administration can transmit messages directly to the villages, saving time consumed in establishing contact with the mandal level officials through telephones, which had been the conventional means of delivering cyclone warnings in remote coastal villages.

Training

The EWS paves the way for evacuation of people to safe places before the calamity strikes. The control room will receive weather reports from the Indian Meteorological Department through Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam and forward the same through the wireless sets to be installed in the offices of the respective village panchayats.

Training is to be given to the villagers in operating the equipment. Most importantly, the EWS will help in quelling rumours that are normally spread during the calamities.

While formally launching the pilot scheme, District Collector M Subrahmanyam hoped that the EWS would make the job of saving lives easy and said that orders were issued to train interested youths in operating the wireless sets. A sum of Rs 45,000 is being spent per village for installing the EWS.

Linkwell Electronics General Manager KK Sarma told The Hindu that a sound amplifier and four loud speakers are being installed in each village in addition to the VHF sets and before the messages are conveyed, sirens would be sounded so that the villagers will be ready to heed the advice of the officials.

Messages can be simultaneously sent to all the 30 villages or separately to a cluster of villages or just one of them by using a dialling code that will be allotted to each village. If all goes well, the EWS will be in place in a few months.

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