Patna, June 25: Members of a tribe in Bihar trust their pigeons to warn them of impending storms or heavy rain.

The Tharus, a Scheduled Tribe who live in the Terai region in West Champaran district, become alert when their pigeons start rushing home before evening. It suggests that a storm or rain is on the way.

This traditional system of getting early warnings about weather disturbances is going to be part of a book, titled Dharohar, which chief minister Nitish Kumar will release at a two-day international conference on disaster risk reduction that will be held in Patna on July 21 and 22.

"We have come across over a dozen such traditional methods which are used by people in different parts of Bihar for getting an early alert on weather-related developments," disaster management department principal secretary Pratyaya Amrit told The Telegraph. "This knowledge has been documented in the form of a book which will the chief minister will release."

The book - which the government says and is a first of its kind initiative in the country - will have six chapters narrating the 16 such traditional weather-warning systems of Bihar.

Experts from the US, Kenya, Tanzania and Nepal will attend the international conference, which also aims to assess Bihar's preparedness of Bihar for meeting the Sendai Framework on Disaster Reduction (2015-2030).

The framework is an international document that UN member states adopted in 2015 during a global conference on disaster risk reduction held at Sendai in Japan.

"The selection of experts has been done after a detailed study about the work done by them and it would be a great learning experience for a state like Bihar which is prone to natural disasters like floods and earthquakes," Amrit said.

"Bihar is the only state in India which has prepared a roadmap for disaster risk reduction in the country," he added.

A total of 27 state government departments will participate in the conference.