This Independence Day, Jharkhand is set to launch its own Global Positioning System (GPS) based software, which will prevent casualties and deaths caused by lightning strikes by sending alert messages over phone to commoners, officials from the State Disaster Management Authority (SDMA) said on Sunday.
The software, designed by Jharkhand Agency for Promotion of Information Technology (JAPIT), will first locate the places that are likely to witness lightning strikes and then scan all the GPS-enabled mobile devices within the periphery of the geographical area that might get affected. The software will automatically send text messages to all the mobile phones that have their GPS location in the area, asking the phone user to take precautionary measures.
“Our main agenda now is prevention of casualties and deaths. JAPIT has been working on the software since a long time and it is ready for use now. We are planning to launch it on Independence Day,” said Manish Tiwary, Joint Secretary of SDMA.
According to figures with the Jharkhand Police, lightning strikes claimed at least 35 lives in Jharkhand in the past one week, taking the death toll to 50 in less than a month.
Lightning has been declared a natural disaster in Jharkhand. The Government pays a compensation of Rs 4 lakh to the family of people who die in lightning strikes here. “We regularly disburse the compensation amounts to all the districts. However, we wanted to work on a project that reduces the casualties. We cannot stop lighting strikes but at least we can alert people and save lives,” Tiwary said.
According to SDMA, around 1,800 people have been killed by lightning in the last 12 years in Jharkhand. The SDMA data says that lightning kills a person every second day on an average in a year. Experts, however, say the numbers are much higher as several deaths in state’s remote areas go unreported. Lightning claimed around 228 lives in Jharkhand in 2016 and 240 in 2017.
While the SDMA is banking on the software for preventing deaths caused by lightning strikes, experts are of the opinion that SMS-based alert systems are already in use and the initiative may not be effective enough. Colonel Sanjay Srivastava, Chairman of Climate Resilient Observing-Systems Promotion Council, a national NGO that works on climatic changes and disaster management, said that many mobile phone Apps are already sending SMS-based alerts and the initiative of the SDMA lacks innovation.
“We have many Apps that send SMS alerts on lightning strikes. What people fail to understand is that most of the people falling prey to lightning strikes either do not have mobile phones or are not using them while they are at risk. Most of the victims are farmers or village children who are out in the open during lightning,” said Srivastava, adding that the State is in need of a system that alerted villagers at a local level through sirens or other similar means.