Amazon Web Services (AWS) has teamed up with Intel, Microsoft and others to help India’s National Association of Software & Service Companies (Nasscom) use technology in the fight against Covid-19.
 
As a first step, the companies have delivered of an end-to-end Covid-19 platform to the government of Telangana. Developed by a Nasscom task force, the open architecture technology platform brings together multiple products and delivers more than 100 dashboards, across 30 government and public datasets, with hundreds of thousands of data points to support the central and state governments in fighting this pandemic.
 
The project showcased the collaborative efforts from several industry leaders and companies in developing the architecture. As well as AWS, Intel and Microsoft, the task force includes Fractal, Infosys, Mindtree, Sap, Wipro, Sprinklr, Sap Labs, Dell, Esri, Zohocorp, Mapbox and Tableau.
 
“AWS supports organisations around the world in the fight against Covid-19 by providing the technology that empowers them to move at the speed necessary to have an impact,” said Rahul Sharma from Amazon Internet Services. “It has been a privilege to work with Nasscom industry workgroup to build a national Covid response platform on AWS using our analytics and machine-learning capabilities. We are also pleased to have collaborated with multiple agencies to help create and support several highly scalable solutions in a matter of days, to enable India to respond quickly to the pandemic.”
 
Working closely with the government of Telangana, the platform, with its various technology led models and data dashboards built under Fractal machine-learning models, will assist the government in sustainable industry recovery and will help it in taking informed decisions in managing lockdown and phased opening across the state.
 
“The IT industry has time and again shown its commitment to helping India and even more so through these exceptional times, by assembling the greatest tech minds in the country to collaborate and develop solutions,” said KT Rama Rao, Telangana’s minister of ITC. “It’s wonderful to see how the technology industry is joining hands with a common goal to innovate for the war on Covid-19. India has the capacity to quickly develop tech for the post-lockdown environment and we are glad that the Nasscom task force has collaborated with the government of Telangana and prepared an end-to-end Covid platform to manage the crisis.”
 
As a part of the platform, the task force has developed Covid-19 India, which will provide real-time streaming of data about the pandemic across regions and states in the country. The platform will source data from public sources that include select social channels, web sites, blogs, forums and public data sets to create actionable reporting dashboards and will allow the government to project insights sourced from the information with public datasets on display on command centre screens. The external citizen-facing dashboard, which has been developed by Fractal, will allow the government to project critical information to the public for transparency, awareness and guidance.
 
“It has been humbling and inspirational to see the industry come together with a commitment to overcome the Covid-19 pandemic by leveraging technology,” said Nivruti Rai, country head for Intel in India. “As part of this Nasscom task force, we have built a technology driven vision of a pandemic response platform for India, a platform that we architected as an open API-based locally hosted, privacy preserving, multi-cloud infrastructure that enables a multitude of citizen-centric apps. This pandemic response platform is designed to augment the central and state governments’ efforts with a robust set of population scale Covid-19 indicators that help predict outbreaks and improve medical care administration.”
 
The task force will also continue work on the T-Covid app and track align the same with the government’s Aarogya Setu app.
 
“It’s been a great privilege to build the platform in the service of the country, and an absolute delight to collaborate with the Nasscom members in our relentless efforts to build it,” said Prashant Mehra from Mindtree.
 
Debjani Ghosh, president of Nasscom, added: “Extremely delighted that the Nasscom task force has worked with the government of Telangana to get them ready with an end-to-end Covid platform to manage the crisis. Technology is definitely our greatest ally in these tough and tiring times. This platform, developed by the some of the top IT minds in the country, showcases a true collaborative effort by the industry for the benefit of India and Indians for better supply chain management, containment, administration, health management, as well as public sentiment and emotion reporting. I’m glad to witness true leadership in testing times, strong focus and resilience and dedication of team members who have worked relentlessly for this.”
 
To fight the global pandemic and provide innovative technology, Nasscom had earlier developed an online compendium of Covid-19 information and shared the same with all state governments and other stakeholders.