Seeds of Resilience Against a Global Pandemic
Bhanu is a leader at one of India’s first Open Social Innovation Center, Digital Impact Square (DISQ), An initiative by TCS Foundation part of the Tata Group. At DISQ, young change-makers from across the country are coached to create sustainable social enterprises that address some of the most pressing social challenges in India. The below blog is an excerpt from one of DISQ’s recent engagement with stakeholders in government and industry in response to the Corona Virus crisis. Know more about the impact DISQ creates, at www.digitalimpactsquare.com
Context
As the global pandemic caused by SARS-Cov2 raged through cities and countries worldwide, we were overwhelmed by the sight of individuals, as well as social, industrial, and financial systems being tested to their limits. Developed countries with world-class medical facilities were struggling to contain the spread of the virus. India, as many will know, is particularly vulnerable to global pandemics. The 1918 Spanish Flu took away the lives of an estimated 18 million people in India.
When analysing the responses to the novel coronavirus, we noticed that each state in India had setup their lines of defense to prevent the virus from entering and checking its spread. The state of Maharashtra had the highest number of cases (16% of all cases in India as of, Apr 4).
Initiation
About a month ago, the Government of Maharashtra, with whom we had been working before I came to Oxford, reached out asking for ways we could collaborate to build solutions to record, trace, track, monitor, and visualize incidents related to the outbreak.
Around the same time, I was following evidence-based research from around the world: they showed how fast tracking identification of cases and their monitoring saved valuable time and lives. Most prominently, groups at the University of Oxford laid the ground work with its research on evidence for mobile based-contact tracing, MIT launched the Private Kit in collaboration with Harvard and Google.
The core team of senior developers and programme managers involved in this effort had the experience of organizing one of the first successful, incident free ‘Kumbh Mela’ in 2015 (the world’s largest gathering of humans over a 45-day period), made possible using technology-led innovations.
Strategy
A plan was drawn out to build systems for three primary stakeholders: citizens, healthcare professionals and administration. Each of these systems would feed into a common dashboard for the state administration to take timely actions.
First, a simple vernacular self-assessment tool for citizens to check their symptoms and self-report. This tool was essential to reduce the panic and anxiety among citizens and offer useful resources.
Second, a tool to gather epidemiological data from the ground, essentially symptoms and cases observed by local health practitioners to create time-series clusters of symptoms to analyze and predict the load on health infrastructures.
Last, a tool to conduct digital ‘contact tracing’ for all those who are suspected primary infected persons or the immediate friends and family of these individuals. This application would provide critical data to the local administration to optimize resource mobilization and deploying measures to stop the spread.
Execution & Impact
We began our efforts towards building these solutions with valuable guidance from government officials, health practitioners and mentors at MIT. Our team of developers were young innovators who had interned at our Innovation center, none or very few were older than 24. Soon, as news spread of our efforts and through our personal contacts, we received more help - technology expertise, infrastructure credits from technology providers and several freelancers volunteered to contribute tirelessly to the effort. We leveraged a sandbox method for developing applications rapidly, based on valuable feedback from users and multiple quick iterations to improve features. In the process, we collaborated with other states on their efforts, shared what we learnt and learnt a lot in return.
Within the first two days of launching the quarantine tracking application, the administration could track over 250 individuals, generated over 3000 alerts and potentially avoided the spread the outbreak. In a little over 48 hours since we launched the self-assessment service, over 175,000 citizens completed self-assessments and about 7% reported themselves with medium to high risk, who were then directed towards helpful resources.
As the applications are being scaled across the state and possibly the country, it has been amazing to see spontaneous offers to collaborate, share knowledge, resources and build systems with no sense of ego, competition or expectation of recognition.
We have a long way to go and much more to do, but the spark of initiative and effort displayed by this group of young innovators and volunteers across government, industry, academia, non-profits, innovation labs and experts, has been inspirational. We shared code, feedback, use-cases, implementation experiences, and more fundamentally, a passion to come together in response to this challenge and defeat a common enemy.
