Bhopal emerges as the hotbed for innovation, using smart technologies, for managing COVID-19

Bhopal launched the cloud based Integrated Command and Control Centre (ICCC), in May 2018, for seven smart cities in the state – Bhopal, Indore, Ujjain, Gwalior, Jabalpur, Satna, and Sagar. It acted as a nerve centre for monitoring and delivering citizen services. It has now been converted into a smart centre for managing the COVID-19 pandemic.

As soon as the lockdown was announced, an in-principle decision was taken to convert the Bhopal smart city integrated command and control centre (ICCC) into a war room. It acted as a data centre, which housed the important decision makers from where the decisions were taken and disseminated across the state. The data from all the cities from MP is being pooled in the war room. The strategy was to not work in isolation but in unison. All the nodal officers, Chief Medical and Health Officer, food supplies, media cell, etc sit in the same location in the war room. All the important state ministries, civic administration, police establishment are working as one team. “We proposed the state Government to convert the Bhopal ICCC into a data centre to consolidate all COVID-19 related information coming from across Madhya Pradesh. It will also house a call centre staffed with personnel to route the calls from the citizens to the respective departments. This is the first of its kind initiative in India, where the smart city CCC has been converted into a war room to manage the COVID-19 crises” says Yogesh Khakre, Company Secretary and COO, B-NeST Incubation Centre, Bhopal Smart City Development Corporation Limited.

The call centre staff were originally working for various city and state level services including the Integrated Traffic Management System (ITMS). They are now trained and repurposed for the call centre operations. Special Operating procedures were prepared for the staff on the kind of questions to be asked for effective query redressal. Following the guidelines from World Health Organisation (WHO) and Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW). As soon as the call is received from a citizen complaining of COVID-19 like symptoms, the necessary Rapid Response Team (RRT), consisting of the medical staff was authorised to collect the data and get the samples and testing done. The doctors were empanelled to check the reports and also guide the citizens on the precautionary measures to be taken in either of the scenarios – whether they test positive or negative for COVID-19. The positive cases are admitted to the Bhopal Memorial Hospital & Research Center (BMHRC). All the protocols to be followed while handling the positive cases when being taken to the hospital; the protocol for the ambulance staff, etc was also properly explained.

The Bhopal Smart City also activated the startups from its incubation centre, BNeST, to come up with innovative solutions in their respective fields of specialisation.

– SNA Sistech – A home automation startup has developed a chamber having a touchless sanitisation dispenser. It consists of a sensor embedded closed chamber open from the front and back, kind of an enclosure. The people are supposed to pass from inside the chamber, which will trigger the sprinkler to sanitise the passer by. The chamber can be put up at open spaces, duly monitored by the police.

– Vizbee – A drone startup has been able to manage to make the drone do sanitisation, across large areas of land, or public spaces, vehicles etc. The same drone is also being used for surveillance.

– Wassup Bhopal and FinchFly – A content marketing startup has generated COVID-19 related videos and useful text content. They have been able to create impactful awareness about the disease by promoting the content, personally and also roping in influencers.

– Healthquick – A healthcare startup has developed an app to identify the location of a COVID-19 suspect, on the map of Bhopal. It basically gives an overview of the positive cases and the hotspots in Bhopal. To an extent, it also describes the travel history of the positive cases.

– The Niramaya app is targeted for the positive cases to manage their testing lifecycle – end to end from doing the testing to getting the reports. The same app can be used for food supplies. The users can download the app and it will be delivered to them. The app based process avoids providing food kits to the same citizens more than once in under a specific time period, which results in food going to the needy and also prevents wastage. The user will not be able to apply for the food kit on the app for a specific number of days after he has already requested for it once.

– The Kabadiwala – A startup, which was into GPS based waste management collection is now delivering food supplies based to all the requests posted. There are 200 vehicles who are delivering supplies, which can be tracked by the phone GPS of co-ordinates.

– Healthcrum – Has done webinars for solving the COVID-19 related queries. A panel of doctors did the webinar using Facebook Live, youtube Live and Zoom calls with the citizens. In under half an hour, almost 1200 people viewed the first webinar. This is done on a daily basis. The startup has enabled telemedicine too