India proposed Wednesday the setting up a South Asian disaster preparedness and management centre in the wake of two major natural disasters that hit the region in less than a year, an Indian official said.
Indian foreign secretary Shyam Saran told reporters New Delhi had offered to host a centre which would be prepared to respond to disasters in South Asia.
The leaders of the seven-member South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) who meet this weekend in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka are expected to make a decision about whether to go ahead with the project, he told journalists Wednesday after a meeting of SAARC foreign secretaries.
The Indian Ocean tsunami which hit three of the seven SAARC countries and last month's earthquake which killed an estimated 87,300 people mostly in Pakistani Kashmir had brought home "the need to build capacity to face the disasters", he added.
SAARC, which groups Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, was founded in 1985 with the aim of fostering closer economic and social ties and alleviating poverty.
