India’s remotest villages will now be better prepared to face another tsunami or any natural calamity.

A Bangalore-based private software company, Geneva Software Technologies, along with the ministry of science and technology has developed the world’s first-of-its-kind multi-lingual disaster alert system – Natural Disaster Information System (NDIS) – that will transmit tsunami and cyclone warning through mobile phones in the form of SMS, within 30 seconds of weather satellite or an earthquake observatory giving an alert signal.

The SMS alerts will be sent in over 100 languages, including 14 regional languages Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, Malayalam, Hindi and Oriya.

The SMS alerts will be followed by voice alerts on the mobile phones as well as fixed phones.

Till now, all disaster alert systems have failed because most warnings are conveyed through TV and radio which could be switched off, alerts are mostly in English, multi-lingual disaster alert systems are complex as it requires GPRS and high end Java phones and users need to subscribe for the service.

Interestingly, with NDIS, the messages will reach any mobile without the need to download alert applications and fonts and works on even basic handsets. The multi-lingual messaging software used by NDIS is compatible with most types of cell phones used in Asia and is compact enough to be stored on a subscriber identity module (SIM) card.

Science and technology ministry contributed $880.000 to the product’s development. This is how it works. The NDIS server first receives the warning from the meteorological department alert system before converting it into an SMS in two seconds.

In the next 19 seconds, the software translates the alerts into multiple languages. In 30 seconds, the SMS reaches the user.

S & T minister Kapil Sibal said, “This is an amazing technology. It could help people in time of disaster like tsunami. It will take sometime before the SMS alerts facility is made available to the common man. “The proposal has been sent to the ministry of home affairs, which is the nodal ministry for handling disaster management.”

Existing text messaging technology requires that both sender and receiver have devices that use Unicode, the standard international system for representing characters on a digital screen. But in rural areas of developing countries, few people can afford Unicode-compliant handsets.