AI Tools Increasingly Used Across Disaster Management Stages

India's disaster management architecture rests on the Disaster Management Act, 2005, which created the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), chaired by the Prime Minister, along with State and District Disaster Management Authorities. The Act defines a disaster as an occurrence causing damage or human suffering that is 'beyond the coping capacity of the community of the affected area', which is why response has traditionally combined community-level preparedness with centralised relief machinery. Globally, disaster risk governance evolved from the Yokohama Strategy and Plan of Action for a Safer World (1994), adopted at the World Conference on Disaster Management, to the later Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (2015-2030), both of which shifted emphasis from post-disaster relief towards prevention, early warning and building resilience through better risk information.

Nepal's recent Bhotekoshi-Trishuli floods exposed how thin state disaster-response capacity can be in mountainous, resource-constrained terrain. In that gap, individual technologists and private operators stepped in: an AI-powered portal matched crowdsourced missing-persons reports against official casualty lists, and drones with thermal cameras searched debris for survivors. This mirrors a broader global shift in which companies like Google, telecom operators and satellite firms have become as central to disaster response as designated government authorities, a real departure from the top-down model envisaged in early disaster-management doctrine.