The Hon. Minister for Science, Technology and Earth Sciences, Shri. Kapil Sibal inaugurated the National Tsunami Early Warning System that has been set up at the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), Hyderabad on October 15, 2007.

The Warning System has been established by Ministry of Earth Science as the nodal ministry at a cost of Rs.125 Crore in collaboration with Department of Science and Technology, Department of Space and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research.

The east and west coasts of India and the island regions are likely to be affected by tsunamis generated mainly by subduction zone related earthquakes from the two potential source regions, viz., the Andaman- Nicobar-Sumatra island arc and the Makran subduction zone north of Arabian Sea. The Indian Tsunami Early Warning System comprises a realtime network of seismic stations, Bottom Pressure Recorders (BPR) and tide gauges to detect tsunamigenic earthquakes and to monitor tsunamis.

Under the modernisation plan, the Mumbai Police department control room has equipped itself with GIS that has the digitised maps of the city with its landmarks and routes. The GIS integrated with the GPS devices fitted on police vehicles provides the personnel manning the control room with the exact location of the vehicles. So far, Rs 240 crore has been allocated for these programmes which have been given an extension till the year 2010 from 2005.

The system detects all earthquake events of more than 6 Magnitude occurring in the Indian Ocean in the less than 20 minutes of occurrence. BPRs installed in the Deep Ocean are the key sensors to confirm the triggering of a Tsunami. The National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) has installed 4 BPRs in the Bay of Bengal and the 2 BPRs in Arabian Sea. In addition, NIOT and Survey of India (SOI) have installed 30 Tide Gauges to monitor the progress of tsunami waves. Integrated Coastal and Marine Area Management (ICMAM) has customised and ran the Tsunami Model for 5 historical earthquakes and the predicted inundation areas. The inundated areas are being overlaid on cadastral level maps of 1:5000 scale. These community-level inundation maps are extremely useful for assessing the population and infrastructure at risk. Highresolution Coastal Topography data required for modelling is generated by the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) using ALTM and Cartosat Data.

A state-of-the-art early warning centre is established at INCOIS enabling reception of real-time data from all the sensors, analysis of the data, generation and dissemination of tsunami advisories following a standard operating procedure. Seismic and sea-level data are continuously monitored in the Early Warning Centre sing a custom-built software application jointly developed with M/s Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) that generates alarms/ alerts in the warning centre whenever a pre-set threshold is crossed.

The National Early Warning Centre will generate and disseminate timely advisories to the Control Room of the Ministry of Home Affairs for further dissemination to the Public. For the dissemination of alerts to MHA a satellite-based virtual private network for disaster management support (VPN DMS) has been established. This network enables early warning centre to disseminate warnings to the MHA, as well as to the State Emergency Operations Centres.