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Digital Shields for Covid

 


As the tragedy caused by the Covid-19 virus spreads in the country, our collective unpreparedness is heightened by our continuing inability to coordinate and direct the resources that flow. We cannot send oxygen cylinders to those who need them. We cannot direct patients to the family. We cannot provide original medicines to patients. We are generally unable to coordinate beyond the use of public social media tools that rely on unidirectional broadcasts.

This is a national disaster that has been happening for more than a year now. India has a disaster management infrastructure, within the purview of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). However, NDMA has evolved further into an organization that can deal well with physically devastating disasters such as hurricanes and earthquakes but does not appear to have any role in the case of germ warfare or disasters caused by germs. This appears to be the case for any other institution in the country, none of which has any institutional structure to respond to a germ that causes a disaster.

However, some physical disaster management frameworks are also applicable to epidemics. The supply chain frameworks required to manage the post-earthquake situation, such as those that occurred in Pugh or Latour etc., should also be useful for coordinating the supply of ventilators, oxygen concentrators, oxygen cylinders, and life-saving medicines such as possibly Remdesivir, family etc., They are some of the key resources to fight the Covid pandemic. The systems created for disaster management could have been reused, to be used to coordinate resource pooling and resource demand aggregation in the current COVID-19 situation. Perhaps the only explanation for why the same thing was not used is that it was allowed to degrade or that the institutions that maintain it do not know how to repurpose these systems.

It reminds me of the traumatic aftermath of the Bug earthquake of two decades ago, when people, in their desire to help, sent old clothes to Pogue, displacing valuable space in trucks that could have been used to send more. Useful resources, so much so that a great deal of clothing sent either was dumped onto the highway or burned to provide warmth in January of 2001. It was a general mess as people were eager to help but had no evidence of contributing that would help, and those who They were aid workers, they didn’t have a mechanism for getting what’s needed and where it’s needed. Since then, many other disasters have occurred, including the 2004 tsunami, many tornadoes, great earthquakes, cloud explosions, etc.

Except for the noteworthy achievement of drastically reducing the loss of life during massive hurricanes, particularly by the coastal states of Odisha and Andhra, we remain unprepared for disaster and post-disaster management. Each disaster has three distinct phases – disaster itself, immediate disaster management and post-disaster relief. Because naturally occurring disasters are so short, be they earthquakes or cloud explosions, there is not much that disaster management systems can do during a disaster, unless we have a mechanism to predict earthquakes or cloud explosions. However, since one can predict mega tornadoes, one was able to take preventive steps to reduce the loss of life.

However, the period immediately following the disaster has crucial hours as relief must be provided on an urgent basis. This is very similar to the urgent need for oxygen and medication for patients severely ill with Covid. Any delay, or engaging in long, inconclusive advisory meetings, at this stage of disaster response is fatal and leads to an increase in the death toll.

Obviously, if we had a system for coordinating resources, pooling their resources from people and from other governments, we could alleviate some of the pain we see as we live in the nightmare of the Chinese virus. Such systems are not difficult to construct. However, they are difficult to maintain as they are only used during disasters, and there are no operations to maintain these systems in the absence of emergencies. We need systems maintenance at all times, so that we have resource pooling and order pooling systems available and working for any future disaster – man-made or natural.

The post-disaster phase is a more important one, and unfortunately it is completely neglected. This is the stage when people need help rebuilding their lives and livelihoods. They need psychological help to heal their scars. This is even more true of children who have lost loved ones and parents and have been isolated for more than a year now, without friends to interact with. The impact on the digital disadvantaged is also more severe. Do we have any systems ready for this? Unfortunately no.

This was the case even during the 1999 Odisha cyclone, when people lost their livelihood assets like fishing nets, chickens, goats, etc., and there was no mechanism to give them any compensation as there was no record of these livelihood assets. The government can use it. Disasters affect people in multiple dimensions, and after two decades we are still unable to comprehend these dimensions, and thus we have not come up with systems and processes that can expand nationally and enable the flow of relief, when needed.

The sad thing is that an IT superpower, with a large trained base of enthusiastic IT volunteers, has not been able to develop support systems even decades after the need for such systems was identified. It may be true that on a capital-per-capital basis, we still have fewer deaths and fewer infections than the United States and indeed most other countries in the world say, and it is true that very few predicted that a second wave of infections would occur. Come on and it’ll be very sinister, however, we must have had the systems in place even when we were surprised. After all, no one can predict an earthquake or a cloud explosion. So, by extension, does that mean that we as a nation will not be able to provide relief for the next earthquake?

India needs to build a robust and urgently scalable emergency response system that can mobilize resources of all kinds from within the country and from all over the world. The system must be in continuous use for non-disaster activities, so that it is a well-functioning disaster management system for times of national crisis. Until that happens, one can look helplessly at the chaotic coordination of resource mobilization and provisioning that is being played out across states, towns and villages, and try to throw our little contributions at random with prayer reaching those who need it.

(Dr. Jegit Bhattacharya is the Chair of the Digital Economy Policy Research Center. Opinions are personal, not necessarily those of Outlook magazine)

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