ISLAMABAD, April 28: Over 6.8 billion dollars have been disbursed among earthquake-affected people to build quake-resistant houses in the NWFP and Azad Kashmir.

This was stated by chairman of the Earthquake Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Authority, Altaf Saleem, at the inaugural session of an international conference on earthquake management here on Saturday.

He said that a comprehensive strategy was being evolved to deal with future earthquakes and disasters through sharing and learning from the experience and good practices in earthquake risk management process.

He said the conference was being organised to share Pakistan’s experiences on earthquake emergency response, early recovery and seismically resistant reconstruction and rehabilitation process with the global community and to articulate firm commitment of the government to develop and implement organised approaches for managing and minimising earthquake risk mainstreaming disaster risk management in the development process.

He said that after the October 8 calamity, the government swiftly moved with the help of the people of Pakistan and the international community.

He said that education institutions and health facilities were functional and community life had come closer to normalcy.

The Erra chairman said the next step was to move towards permanent and sustainable reconstruction and rehabilitation of the affected areas.

Erra deputy chairman Lt. Gen Nadeem Ahmed said that there was no institutional structure that could help meet a high magnitude disaster, when the October 8 earthquake rattled parts of Pakistan.

“We never felt urgency for establishing an institutional framework fully capable of undertaking operations at the bigger level in case of devastating situations.

Despite the fact that we did not have any such institutions, we were able to meet the challenges of October 8 earthquake, and set examples for the international community.”

He invited comments, suggestions and input from the experts for further improvement of the implementation process.

He said the input from the experts would be incorporated into the long term disaster risk management framework.