Recently, heavy rains triggered massive floods and landslides in Maharashtra’s coastal Konkan region and western districts as well as in the State of Goa. Amazon’s Disaster Relief Pre-Positioning initiative enabled us to deploy 900 relief kits to Raigad in Maharashtra & 500 relief kits to Goa in a timely manner.
When such emergencies occur, ensuring that relief material reaches affected communities at the earliest is key – and is the very premise of Amazon’s Disaster Relief Pre-Positioning initiative.
The initiative is focused on pre-positioning hygiene and shelter disaster relief supplies across key sites in India, serving as central locations to support regions hit hardest by natural disasters, such that the relief material reaches the communities in a timely manner.
The Amazon India team has been supporting various disaster campaigns from 2015 onward and has impacted more than 10 lakh people. Since the earlier process involved identifying vendors, assessing the availability of relief products, finalizing price, and subsequently organizing transportation etc., getting materials delivered quickly was a huge challenge.
To address this, the team began a pilot initiative with 2500 pre-positioned relief kits in strategic locations across the country, allowing rapid response to urgent requests.
The first activation of the India pre-positioning pilot took place when Cyclone Tauktae severely affected Raigad and Ratnagiri districts in Maharashtra, in early May 2021. The Amazon team was able to deliver 300+ shelter kits to support cyclone affected tribal communities in Shriwardhan Taluka, Dist. Raigad through Sub Division Office, Shriwardhan and the ATS team.
The kits comprised of soap, sanitary napkins, bathing soap, ground sheets and tarpaulin sheet etc. The focus continues to remain on evergreen items that are usually required in most disaster situations.
During any disaster, Amazon’s Disaster Relief Pre-Positioning team will work closely with partners who comply with our requirements and have a presence in the affected state, where the support is required. Our logistics expertise will be leveraged to ensure that the material reaches affected sites in a planned and effective manner, thus reducing the response time for disaster relief work, the company said.
While this is the beginning, our program aims to aim support the affected families in 72 hours after the disaster, and teams at Amazon India are working on making seamless processes that will help achieve this and thus provide timely help to those in need.
