Dr. R. K. Dave

Dr. R. K. Dave is a disaster risk management practitioner with more than four decades of field and advisory work. His experience includes the 2001 Bhuj earthquake, the 2006 Surat flood, and the 2013 Kedarnath flash flood. He is the founder of RESPECT (Renewing and Empowering Society’s Progress, Enhancing Capabilities through Technologies), which works on resilience through practical use of technology.

He has advised national and state disaster-management agencies, and has worked on early-warning and hydrometeorological assignments supported by the World Bank, the Green Climate Fund, and the Asian Development Bank. His work covers the full disaster-risk continuum: prevention, preparedness and warning, response, and recovery. He treats early warning as a public service that must reach the household, not only the control room.

His working rule is that disaster-risk capacity must begin with self-response at every level, and that each family should have at least one trained disaster-risk-reduction volunteer.

He is the author of Adaptive Disaster Risk Management: Global Challenges, Strategies, and Innovations (2026) and Disaster Management in India: Challenges and Strategies (2018). The 2026 book is written for practitioners and managers. It sets out capacity-matched systems that a country can own, finance, and keep running after a project ends.

He is a retired officer of the Indian Radio Regulatory Service and currently works as Director of the Early Warning and Risk Intelligence Committee of the International Association of Disaster Management.