Virtual Inventory Through Contractual Agreements: Reduces physical inventory while maintaining quality and speed of delivery.

Reverse Supply Chain Framework: Seeing the whole system as the opposite flow as compared to conventional Supply Chain eases material and information flow. Also responsibilities could be assigned thereby ensuring quality and speed.

Information Sharing: Contractual agreements with corporate, governments and NGOs encourage information sharing.

Mapping: Mapping of the geography ensures a dormant disaster management backbone in place which becomes active instantaneously.

The model proposed in this paper forms a backbone supply chain that ensures speed, quality and continuity of relief material to the disaster affected area. The mainstream operations high-lighted in the paper remain the same irrespective of the nature of disaster. Only the relief operations at the site of the disaster vary with respect to the natural calamity. Hence, on repeated setups and functioning of this supply chain, it is easy to increase the efficiency of such processes.

The limitations of this paper are that it does not consider the help received from other governments and international organizations. However, that can be easily handled by setting up a new RD or additional responsibilities for the existing RDs. Also, the concept of mapping areas into geographical zones based on the probability of occurrence of a disaster has great scope for research into developing a mathematical model that shall determine exactly the sensitivity map in the case of natural disasters.

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* Contributed by: -
Madhuker Priyesh & Varun Ramanan,
IIM Lucknow.