India to host global dam safety meet at Thiruvananthapuram

India will host the International Dam Safety Conference - 2018 at Thiruvananthapuram on 23 and 24 January.

The conference at Trivandrum is seeing the participation of 550 delegates from over 20 countries. 

Pinarayi Vijayan, chief minister of Kerala will inaugurate the conference

The Central Water Commission is organising the event in association with Kerala Water Resources Department (KWRD), Kerala State Electricity Board, National Institute of Technology Calicut and College of Engineering, Trivandrum.

Dam safety conferences are organised as an annual event under the Dam Safety Rehabilitation and Improvement Project (DRIP) project being run by the ministry of water resources, river development and Ganga rejuvenation in the seven states of Jharkhand, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, and Uttarakhand.

Launched in 2012 with a financial outlay of Rs2,100 crore, this World Bank-aided project aims at  the rehabilitation of old dams in the country that could be experiencing distress and are in need of attention for ensuring their structural safety and operational efficiency.

The project also aims to strengthen the institutional capacity and project management in this area. As part of this exercise, DRIP has been engaged in bringing greater awareness on dam safety issues and finding novel solutions to address them by pooling the best technologies, knowledge and experience available around the world.

Towards this end, Dam Safety Conferences are organised as annual events in the different DRIP states. Dam professionals, academicians, scientists, as well as industries assemble to deliberate on the problems associated with the dam safety and share the concepts, techniques, instruments, materials etc. available to address the design and construction of new dams, and also for monitoring, surveillance, operation, maintenance, rehabilitation along with disaster mitigation measures for existing dams.

Seven dam safety guidelines and manuals developed under DRIP will also be released for implementation during the conference. A software programme, Dam Health and Rehabilitation Monitoring Application (DHARMA),  will also be launched during the conference. DHARMA is a web tool to digitise all dam related data effectively. It will help to document authentic asset and health information pertaining to the large dams in the country, enabling appropriate actions to ensure need based rehabilitation. It is a new stride in asset management aspect by India.