Karnataka is setting up a Natural Calamities Relief Fund with a corpus of Rs 125 crore to reduce hardships of the people hit by such disasters besides meeting the demands of the affected districts. This will cover man-made disasters which are not covered under the Centre's state disaster response fund guidelines. Karnataka is the first state in the country to have taken the lead in adopting guidelines issued by the Planning Commission on this count. Stating this today, Chief Minister Siddaramiah told experts attending the conference on building resilient cities that in addition the government had earmarked Rs 100 crore for overall disaster management. According to him, the mass casualty response in particular remains the same for natural and man made disasters requiring adequate preparedness. In this connection, he said the government was committed to making all the cities safe for its residents. For this, it had allocated Rs 150 crore for building the required infrastructure in Bangalore, Mysore, Mangalore, Belgaum and Hubli-Dharwad. The idea was to ensure that these cities become safe in the next five years. The three-day workshop on building resilient cities, organised by the Disaster Management section of the state revenue department, is being attended by national and international experts in the field of urban terror, emergency response to nuclear and biological threats, bio-disaster and terrorism, exercise planning and evaluation and the role of information in pro-active decision making. Speaking on the occasion, Mr Shashidhar Reddy, vice-chairman, National Disaster Management Agency, New Delhi, underlined the need for reviewing decisions relating to heavy investments in existing urban centres and cities. The time, he said had come for investing in small and medium cities to reduce impact of urbanisation as it posed its own challenges. In this context, he said by 2015, Delhi and Mumbai alone could boast of populations exceeding 20 million, turning as they would into mega cities. To that extent urbanisation would pose its own problems. One of the immediate problems in this context, he emphasised, could be urban flooding, the like of which was seen a few years ago in Mumbai. Similarly, he said none of the cities in the country had a manual on storm water system with updates. Desilting of storm water drains, he explained, to prevent massive flooding was one of the first steps in this regard. In fact, NDMA guidelines suggested that drains had to be desilted by 31 March in all the cities, much before the onset of monsoons. Predictably, this guideline was rarely followed.