While several United Nations agencies have round-the-clock programmes to readily meet the needs of those suffering from disasters, many focus on reducing vulnerability in the first place. The Chronicle looks at both sides of disaster management.

January 26 was supposed to be an easy day off in India, commemorating the nation's adoption of its constitution — Republic Day — and this year the holiday fell on Friday so some people were waking up to a long, lazy weekend. But natural disasters are indiscriminate. At 8:46 a.m. local time, the ground shook.

Disasters come in many forms, both natural and man-made — earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, locust swarms, livestock plagues, war, and the breakdown of law and order. The state of Gujarat, which was hit hardest, had been in the throes of a two-year severe drought that had reduced its agricultural production, which is primarily rain-fed, by as much as 30 per cent. The poor, women and children were already in a fragile state.

The first action was search and rescue, swiftly conducted by national teams. International teams arrived late the following night and two days later, relief teams and supplies began to arrive. According to the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination team in Gujarat, at one time, the collective effort involved 245 organizations and agencies, including at least 55 national and 99 international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 20 donor government teams, 10 UN and international organizations, and Red Cross representatives from 10 countries.

Two days after the disaster struck, sectoral committees were formed covering health, shelter, water, sanitation, relief and logistics. Later, children and women were also made sectoral issues.

The combination of sectoral and general meetings ensured a more meaningful exchange of information between the NGOs, the Government and the UN family.

Some of the early relief operations included critical life-saving drugs and medicine provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). WHO also collaborated with the Government to develop a comprehensive programme for disease surveillance in the worst affected areas of Gujarat, similar to the system established in the aftermath of the tropical cyclone in Orissa in 1999.

The World Food Programme (WFP) began with the deployment of 300 metric tons of high energy biscuits to the earthquake zone for distribution to 100,000 people for 15 days. Later, it launched a four-month, $4-million-operation food aid programme to assist pregnant women, nursing mothers and children, as well as distribute packages of wheat flour and lentils to families. The United Nations Population Fund provided mobile health services to meet health needs in general, and reproductive health needs in particular. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) fielded a mission to assess the damage to crops, livestock and agriculture infrastructure.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and United Nations Volunteers (UNV) recruited 107 national UNVs to help coordinate a group of 5,000 volunteers from youth organizations near the epicentre of the earthquake.

The Emergency Response Division of UNDP also set up a permanent mechanism for disaster preparedness and mitigation training. Together with the United Nations Centre for Human Settlements (Habitat), UNDP would also support an ongoing project with local organizations in a reconstruction and rehabilitation process through building temporary and permanent housing solutions with vulnerability-reduction orientation. UNICEF supplied locally purchased education kits, school tents and trained teachers. In light of the estimated 3 million children below 15 years of age directly affected by the earthquake in the six hardest hit districts of Gujarat, UNICEF and its partners played a key role in advocating and ensuring that the children received trauma counselling. The United Nations family and its partners are still working in full force to help the Indian quake victims while situations in such areas as Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, Eritrea, El Salvador and Sudan also require urgent humanitarian relief. In fact, an Inter-Agency Appeal for some $34 million to help El Salvador, which was devastated by another earthquake, was launched the same day India was hit.

Less than a week after the Gujarat quake, some 200 government officials and disaster specialists attended a conference in Japan to focus on the lessons learned from the 1995 earthquake in Kobe that killed 6,432 people. UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Kenzo Oshima announced plans to open the first UN Asian office in Kobe to monitor earthquakes and other world disasters. Similar offices already exist in Geneva and New York.

Most important and one of the major challenges confronting countries throughout the world is how to mitigate the risks faced by disaster-prone communities and how to help in their rehabilitation once a disaster has struck.

The Special Relief Operations Service of FAO provides agricultural inputs and equipment to bridge the gap until regular supplies become available. Some recent projects include the coordination of agricultural emergency activities in East Timor, and emergency assistance to enhance logistical and technical capacities of the Department of Livestock Services against African swine fever.

Habitat's Risk and Disaster Management Programme, among other activities, fields assessment and technical advisory missions to disaster-prone countries, and designs implementation and backstopping projects at national, regional and global levels in collaboration with other countries and external support agencies. They include rebuilding communities in urban Afghanistan, supporting flood prevention and rehabilitation projects in China and Bangladesh, assisting in settlement rehabilitation in northern Iraq, and restoring urban governance and service delivery in Somalia.

The Disaster Reduction and Recovery Programme of UNDP focuses on promoting and supporting capacity building and/or strengthening appropriate national authorities and institutions for the mitigation, prevention and preparedness of natural, technological/industrial and environmental disasters.

Under this scheme are the programme for the Guagua Pichincha Volcano in Ecuador, supporting the disaster management system in Viet Nam and capacity building of the National Disaster Management Authority in Mozambique.

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has a joint UNEP/Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Environment Unit that provides urgent assistance to countries affected by environmental disasters, such as industrial/technological accidents, chemical and oil spills, forest fires, floods, and other sudden-onset emergencies that damage the environment and human health and welfare. Recently, the Unit has responded to the threat of dam breaks in Armenia and Georgia, forest fires in Brazil, acute river pollution in Chile and a chemical fire in Madagascar.

UNICEF provides reconstruction and development assistance, as well as actively participating in the issues of education and youth, minorities, gender and trafficking in human beings. In Yugoslavia, it has deployed mobile assessment teams to review the overall situation and needs, focusing on health, nutrition, water and sanitation, education and social welfare. In Albania, it has set up Youth Parliaments with a view to increasing youth participation in public debates.

WHO maintains a team of experts on standby, ready to be deployed to a disaster site within 24 hours. Emergency responses include containing an Ebola outbreak in Gulu, Uganda and assessing the health risks and needs of depleted uranium radiation exposure in Kosovo.

In his Millennium Report, Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced the launch of a new disaster response programme, called "First on the Ground", that will provide and maintain mobile and satellite telephones, as well as microwave links, for humanitarian workers. The initiative, he said, would be led by Ericsson — a leading provider of communications solutions that combine mobile telecom and datacom technologies. It has joined with the United Nations, through the Secretary-General's Global Compact programme for promoting voluntary corporate social responsibility, in this partnership project of benefit to developing countries.

Ericsson said its response formalizes the company's commitment to developing "a better, faster response to human suffering caused by disasters". The company's local offices around the world will establish disaster preparedness programmes in partnership with UNDP, OCHA and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. In addition to rapid deployment communications solutions, it will include a global advocacy programme and a web-based community of experts.