India is the world’s second most populated country after China. Besides having agriculture base, India is now concentrating on consolidating its industrial base and is a major exporter of several products to the Middle East and other Asian countries. However, due to its large geographical spread, the country faces many natural disasters which create havoc with the lives of those in the disaster area. This envisages the appropriate knowledge management and sharing for minimizing the effects of such disaster through effective knowledge management and sharing.

There is a general assumption is that knowledge management is only about implementing best practices and that people will store data for later use.

This is not true because knowledge management is about applying the right knowledge in the appropriate place at the correct time. Taking a wider view of knowledge management in disaster preparedness, there are various occasions when a disaster is mishandled because resources are not handled in the proper manner due to the lack of knowledge management principles.  This envisages that information lying in one place was not transferred to where it was desperately needed. It is a recorded fact that India is one of the most disaster-prone countries in the world. Due to its large geographical area, disaster management information is not codified and is restricted to individuals as implicit know-how.

This means the relationship must be strengthened between all government and private agencies that handle disaster management. Therefore it is imperative to forge strong links between the organization and people so that they can create a platform for sharing their experiences and expertise with each other. This will make the sharing of knowledge management easier and will also make it accessible in areas where the information has to be instantly used. This network will connect all government institutions and people experienced in knowledge management. The approach of the Indian Government is to implement knowledge management applications in a way that the information is freely available wherever it is needed, whenever it is needed to reduce the risk of disasters.

This will be made possible through seminars and workshop on KM and creating and storing documents of experiences which can be shared on the World Wide Web Portal. This will strengthen the network disseminating knowledge management to obtain quicker and more positive responses, Authorized Government sponsored Disaster Management Departments, the Better utility of available resources, Assimilation into main-stream development, Adequate monitoring of progress and the Promotion of good work ethics in the disaster management population.