Experts at a concluding ceremony of a training workshop have stressed the urgent need to give proper and practical trainings to the youths especially varsity students enabling them to efficiently handle the major emergencies as well as natural calamities including floods, inferno and drought in the Sindh province. They said with grave concern that the province lacked any contingency plan to tackle major disasters and emergency responses which carried risk of heavy loss of lives and property at any point of time.
They were addressing the concluding ceremony of a five-day workshop held at SU's Abida Taherani Sindh Rural Development Centre (SRDC) here on Monday. As many as 111 students from various departments and centers took part in the training. The SU Vice Chancellor Professor Dr Fateh Muhammad Burfat who presided over the ceremony distributed certificates among the participants.
Addressing on the occasion, Dr Burfat said he will call the training workshop 'successful' only after the positive change in the behaviors of those students took part in it could be seen. He said that the university students must join the hands of those institutions which extended support to the common people and took part in relief operations in case of national calamities and disasters.
Vice Chancellor said the effort could not be fruitful lest an integrated approach was adopted and each of the universities allowed identifying possible risks, requirements and shortcomings through research. He said that an action plan must be formulated by the NGO 'Fast Rural Development Program' (FRDP) at such workshops to mitigate the human sufferings in case of an earthquake, floods and other predicaments. Dr Burfat hoped that a comprehensive plan would be in place by FRDP to reduce human loss in case of natural disasters by making the youths trained under the theme of emergency response.
Addressing the participants, the chairman of FRDP Muhammad Aachar Bozdar stressed a close liaison between the government departments and the NGOs in implementing the plan of training the students of universities.
He said that his organization was doing a lot of things to cope with disasters through the youths and that 20 students out of those 111 who attended workshop had been selected for a month long training adding that they would be getting the stipend and other facilities too. "The season of floods is about to come, we want to prepare our youths to save the precious lives of those who may suffer in case of any possible disaster", he said.
Professor of SU's Sindh Rural Development Centre Dr Shahabuddin Mughal said that the participant students from diverse backgrounds gave their multi-sectoral and comprehensive input adding that the ideas given by the students would be included in the next plan of organizing a training workshop.
He said the resource persons discussed the various aspects of the subjects like addressing resources constraints and co-ordination issues, monitoring of relief and evacuation and post-disaster evaluation with the participants. He said the awareness and capacity building and emergency response system were also discussed at length as mid-term measures for risk reduction. On the side of long term measures, proposals were propounded and discussed on vulnerability reduction, preparedness and rehabilitation. Director SRDC Dr Ghulam Ali Jareko, the representative of provincial disasters management authority, Govt of Sindh Ajay Kumar and others also spoke on the occasion.
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