Using indigenous techniques to reduce the dependency on outside resources. Background: Andhra Pradesh (AP) is a state that has suffered the most from the adverse effects of severe cyclones, floods, and drought. It is estimated that about 90% of AP's total territory are vulnerable to tropical storms, floods, and related hazards, while the coastal belt is even more vulnerable to natural disasters, and the state's population is compounded by the recurrent impact of disasters. Methods: Vulnerability Analysis, Situational Analysis, Participatory Vulnerability Capacities Assessment, Hazard Hunt Capacity building. Results: The project is a model to all the vulnerable communities; capacities of vulnerable communities are increased and confident of combating the disaster situations. Innovative elements and results: Horizontal trainings by trained taskforce members in other vulnerable villages are conducted on their own initiation. Cost Effectiveness: There is no need to purchase anything from outside to implement this initiative at vulnerable villages. Workshop with the Education Department officials: Workshops with the department and regular one-on-one meetings have been organized. Lessons Learned: Flexibility and patience in order to survive and grow the structures, admit to mistakes, and correct them. Conclusion: CHALLENGES: Initially, there was no response from the government as well as from the local communities. How to improve similar initiatives in the future? A similar intervention can be implemented in other villages overcoming the above mentioned challenges, involving the trained children and task force groups of this project. Replication: This intervention can be replicated in any part of the world, at a vulnerable village or school based on the type of disaster-but same methodology can be adopted for any type of disaster. This can be replicated to any context either for Tsunami or Cyclone prone, floods or flash floods, fire accident zone, or in a peacetime.

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Introduction:Pressure in the workplace has been studied in a number of settings. Many studies have examined pressure from physiological and psychological perspectives, mainly through studies on stress. Performing under pressure is a fundamentally important workplace issue, not least for complex, volatile, and emergency situations.Aim:This research aims to better understand performance under pressure as experienced by health and emergency staff in the workplace.Methods:Three basic questions underpin the work: (1) how do health and emergency workers experience and make sense of the ‘pressures’ entailed in their jobs? (2) What impacts do these pressures have on their working lives and work performance, both positively and negatively? (3) Can we develop a useful explanatory model for ‘working under pressure’ in complex, volatile, and emergency situations?The present paper addresses the first question regarding the nature of pressure; a subsequent paper will address the question of its impact on performance. Using detailed interviews with workers in a range of roles and from diverse settings across Ecuador, this study set out to better understand the genesis of pressure, how people respond to it, and to gain insights into managing it more effectively, especially with a view to reducing workplace errors and staff burnout. Rather than imposing preformulated definitions of either ‘pressure’ or ‘performance,’ we took an emic approach to gain a fresh understanding of how workers themselves experience, describe and make sense of workplace pressure.Results:This paper catalogs a wide range of pressures as experienced by our participants and maps relationships between them.Discussion:We argue that while individuals are often held responsible for workplace errors, both ‘pressure’ and ‘performance’ are multifactorial, involving individuals, teams, case complexity, expertise, and organizational systems, and these must be taken into account in order to gain better understandings of performing under pressure.