Quotidian Early Warning Solutions for Developing Economies

Dear Sharon,
Thanks for going through my proposal and raising this very important question.
The proposed solutions try to establish the organic connect of the communities with the mainstream Early Warning systems (EWS) by making them active stakeholders in entire spectrum of EW. It cracks the vital bottlenecks in real time dissemination by proposing simplistic uses of street lights and home appliances and hence making the whole solutions very affordable. Laying major emphasis on the last mile connectivity and cost effectiveness makes it a useful proposition.
South Asia faces some of the worst disaster impacts, this is further exacerbated by the large population. 76.9 % of the global population exposed by floods lives in this region. For countries which fair poorly on development parameters, allocating resources for dedicated early system for all people at risk, could be a constraint. In South Asia where Govts have pressure to reach out to large no of people in disasters, such low cost solutions can bring a paradigm shift in EW approaches.
To further illustrate my statement, In 2016-17, with support from world bank, Government of Odisha installed 162 Early Warning Dissemination Towers in 06 coastal districts at cost of INR 75 Crores which converts roughly to 10.90 million US Dollars. The existing infrastructure caters to the need of 122 vulnerable centers largely, fishing landing sites, tourist spots and coastal villages. There are nearly 380 tsunami prone villages in Odisha. So a comprehensive outreach with a very basic estimate, will cost the state approximately 25 million US dollars. Coastal length of Odisha is 480 kms. Whereas, in India the Tsunami prone regions stretches out to 5700 kms. If we extrapolate the Odisha's costs pan India It comes around 300 million USD. That is approximately double the budget of India's 2017 National Health Policy. These calculations are just to emphasize on the point that when it comes to provide disaster safety, EW schemes quite often lose out to the populist and other equally relevant schemes. And cost is one of the major determinants. That is why even after 15 years of the Indian ocean tsunami we see only 122 locations in mammoth 5700 kms of tsunami prone coasts to be covered by realtime tsunami alert system. We can only wish for a 100% coverage with the current strategy. And have just taken example of tsunami. Include other disasters like floods and the target will look even more difficult to achieve.
Now imagine a scenario, where Early Warning Systems are integrated with TV Set Top Boxes. We can provide a system at 15 USD. That is 2490 USD as against 10.9 million USD. And the most interesting part is that, most of it will be self financed by households because these are the essential commodities of need. We just need to design a smart multi-purpose device. So I propose this idea with a conviction that It can bring a revolutionary change existing Early Warning system.
Talking about Lifetowers which is a street light based warning system, again it comes with similar advantage of being cost effective where majority of costs are already borne by a development scheme. Lifetowers has a specific advantage of detecting settlement inundation and relaying warnings in a real time. It can precisely detect and warn which areas are going to be inundated, giving precious and life saving lead time to down stream communities ranging from few minutes to few hours. This brings all action of detection, communication and dissemination and response - all in the last mile. We are losing lives due to last mile disconnect. This will change with lifetowers and similar such propositions.
In Early Warning, I firmly believe that, Governments and society should not solely depend on one single solution. There should always be a back up plan. Both high end technologies and low cost solutions should compliment to establish a fail safe system. Cost effectiveness and simplicity is the strength of this proposition.
I have accommodated some of these points in the main proposal as well.