Sanjaya Bhatia
October 1, 2019 — People
Head, UNDRR Office for Northeast Asia and Global Education and Training Institute (GETI)
United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction’s (UNDRR) mandate is to serve as the focal point in the United Nations system for the coordination of disaster risk reduction and to ensure synergies among disaster risk reduction activities. Sanjaya Bhatia is the Head of the Office of UNDRR Office for Northeast Asia (ONEA) and Global Education and Training Institute (GETI) for Disaster Risk Reduction in Incheon, Republic of Korea, where over the past two years he has guided the training of over 3000 government officials.
Before taking this position Sanjaya Bhatia worked as a head of the International Recovery Platform (IRP) – Secretariat at Kobe, Japan where he led the development of the Guidance Notes on Recovery and supervised a capacity building program for national and local governments, along with other knowledge management functions. He trained over 850 government officials in that period.
Earlier as the Focal Point Disaster Resilient Schools and Hospitals with the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR) of the World Bank he was instrumental in development of the “Guidance Notes on Safer School Construction” and the “Guidance Notes on Integrating DRR in Health Sector Projects” and financing of projects on safe schools and hospitals.
He has worked with the Government of India, the World Bank, and the United Nations in the field of disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation for over 26 years.
He has managed projects for mainstreaming of disaster risk reduction and CCA and ex-post recovery in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Haiti, Iran, Turkey, Lao PDR, Cambodia, China, Serbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Belarus, Ukraine, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Georgia, Armenia, Mongolia and the Philippines. He was instrumental in the construction of 6,500 seismically safe primary school buildings.
He holds a degree in law and a Masters Degree in Public Administration from New York University. He has authored a number of publications.
He is a certified trainer for the Incident Command System (Emergency Management) and functioned as a trainer and resource person for the Government of India and the United Nations.