On January 6th, the Centre for Public Policy Research (CPPR) hosted a webinar titled “Building Coastal Resilience: Innovative Approaches to Disaster Management in India”. This was the third webinar part of the Indian Coastal Think Tank Network Project (ICTN), supported by The Asia Foundation. The network aims to foster a coalition of coastal think tanks, focusing on themes such as climate change and gender, coastal security, blue economy, disaster management, coastal ecology, fisheries, tourism, maritime domain awareness, and ports and shipping.
The webinar hosted three experts on Coastal Disaster Management – Mihir Bhatt, Director of All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI); Dunu Roy, Director of Hazards Centre, Delhi; and Dr N Venugopalan, Programme Manager at International Collective in Support of Fish Workers.
Mihir R. Bhatt is Director of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI). He was a Senior Fellow of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative since 2007 and was a member of the panel that selects the Humanitarian Coordinators for the United Nations. He advised Climate Development Knowledge Network’s work on climate compatible development in nine states (including coastal) of India with focus on urban resilience, green finance, and renewable energy at subnational level.
He works on reducing risk-related action and learning: interconnectedness of oceanic risks and coastal risks with focus on overlooked areas such as action data, policy performance, and behavioural aspects of extreme events in India’s coastal areas and in Asia Pacific. He has worked with teams on uncertainty and transformation in the delta of Sundarbans, coastal Mumbai metro; and coastal Kutch desert communities.
Anubrotto Kumar Roy, popularly known as Dunu Roy, is a chemical engineer by training, a social scientist by compulsion, and a political ecologist by choice. Born in 1945, he obtained his B.Tech in 1967 and M.Tech in 1969 from the Department of Chemical Engineering, IIT Bombay. As the Director of the Hazards Centre in New Delhi, Dunu Roy has dedicated over four decades to addressing critical issues in both rural and urban contexts, including land and water management, secure settlements, safe work, environmental planning, leadership training, and pollution control.
Dr N Venugopalan has been working in the International Collective in Support of Fishworkers for the last twenty years, and currently he is the programme manager at ICSF.
Aleena T Sabu is a Research Associate of the International Relations Vertical at the Centre for Public Policy Kochi, Kerala, India. She is currently working on the Indian Coastal Think Tank Network project and had previously worked on a paper with Vice Admiral MP Muralidharan on the Global Security Implications of the Bay of Bengal. Aleena has completed her Master’s in Politics and International Relations from Pondicherry University and Bachelor’s in Political Science (Hons) from Delhi University.