India: How technology can help India cope with natural disasters
By Srikanth RP
The year 2019 has been one of the worst years in the history for India when it comes to natural disasters. More than 13 Indian states (Kerala, Gujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Odisha) have been affected due to floods. Government reports state that this year has been witness to the heaviest monsoon rains to wreck havoc in India in the last 25 years. More than 1,600 people have been killed with millions of people losing their homes and their livelihood.
[…]
Can technology help? In India, some pilot projects and initiatives launched by different states can serve to be the right models for other states to follow. Take, for example, the pilot project done by Google in collaboration with the Central Water Commission, to estimate the flood level situation in Patna. Google claims that its AI based model was used to send a map-based alert to people who lived within thousand square kilometers around Patna. The map indicated which areas were likely to get more flooded and which areas had the probability of not being flooded. Google claims that the accuracy of its model was over 90 per cent.
[…]
Odisha is the first state in the country that has implemented an Early Warning Dissemination System (EWDS). This aims at establishing a foolproof communication system to address the existing gap of disseminating disaster warning from the state, district and block levels to communities. It covers 1205 villages in 22 blocks of six coastal districts of the state which are prone to multifarious hydro-meteorological disasters like cyclones, floods and tsunamis. This system integrates technologies such as digital mobile radio, location based alert systems, remotely operated siren systems and universal gateways. The system helps in disseminating warning communication simultaneously from the state, district and block levels in different forms like messages, voice, siren, etc. The early warning dissemination is fail proof and operates on a 24/7 basis in all circumstances.
[…]
Kerala State IT Mission has carried out a brainstorming and decided to develop a crisis management system following the crowdsourcing method and to deploy the same in the shortest possible time, following a DevOps methodology. A crisis management platform was developed and hosted and made available to the public available at the URL www.keralarescue.in It was up and running within 12 hours after the first day of flooding. This was made possible through the contributions of techies across the globe who volunteered to code, review and recode to enhance the functionality of the platform as demanded by the need confronting the state.
[…]