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India’s telecom infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable to natural hazards and disasters, with over 58% of the land exposed to earthquakes and other hazards. To address this, CDRI, in collaboration with the Department of Telecommunications, Government of India, and the National Disaster Management Authority, developed a Disaster Risk and Resilience Assessment Framework (DRRAF).
The study mapped 0.77 million towers across five high-risk states and proposed resilience measures across technical, operational, policy, financial, and institutional domains.
Key recommendations include enhancing network redundancy, improving hazard data, enabling risk-informed governance, and promoting last-mile connectivity. The framework emphasizes a 3E approach—Explore, Evaluate, Execute—and aims to reduce damage, ensure rapid service restoration, and strengthen sectoral capacity. A robust roadmap and resilience index guide stakeholders in building a disaster-resilient telecom sector aligned with global standards.
Key points
- India’s telecom infrastructure faces increasing multi-hazard disaster vulnerability nationwide.
- Disaster resilience framework developed using 3E: Explore, Evaluate, Execute approach.
- Risk and resilience indices guide planning across five vulnerable states.
- Recommendations include redundancy, emergency devices, and seismic resilience for towers.
- Robust data, governance, and risk-sharing platforms urgently need development.
- Last-mile connectivity, institutional capacity, and monitoring systems must be strengthened.