New Delhi:(Page3 News Network)-The ongoing training of the combined medical team of National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) and AIIMS Trauma Centre with the Swiss Medical Experts being held at AIIMS Trauma Centre concluded today. This highly specialized one week training of the combined team of 9 doctors and 12 nursing/ paramedical persons was being conducted since Nov 26, 2012. This combined medical team of NDRF and AIIMS Trauma Centre is part of the NDRF’s Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Heavy Team. National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) had approached United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) for the International Search and Rescue Advisory Group (INSARAG) - INSARAG External Classification (IEC) of NDRF’s Heavy Team and the same has been earmarked for the year 2015.
Under the “Framework Agreement between India and Switzerland on Cooperation in the Events of Disasters” programmes are being organized by Swiss Development Cooperation (SDC) for USAR capacity building of the NDRF since 2008 onwards. NDMA in 2010 suggested SDC to consider NDRF’s USAR training towards IEC which is globally acclaimed prerequisite for International deployment during situations of earthquakes and collapsed structure emergencies.
The IEC process is a UN organized, voluntary, international peer review of collapsed structure rescue capabilities of a USAR team that may be required to deploy internationally The IEC certified USAR teams are registered with the INSARAG Secretariat of UNOCHA, Geneva.
There are currently 28 IEC qualified international USAR teams in the world, including the United States, China, Russia, UK, Japan, Singapore, Australia and the most European countries. These USAR teams get priority in the affected country in terms of entry, immigration and customs procedures, transportation and task allocation in case of international deployment.
Following the devastating earthquake of unpresedented scale that resulted Tsunami and leakage in the Fukushima nuclear power-plant in Japan in March 2011, one NDRF team was deployed internationally (for the first time) in Onagawa, Japan and did commendable painstaking work that was widely appreciated by the people, media and the Japanese Prime Minister himself. But this deployment was done on the basis of bilateral relations between the two countries which took a lot of time in decision making. Once the IEC certification of NDRF team is done in 2015, the team will be readily available for international deployment in a situation of major Earthquake scenario for Search and Rescue operations.
