India’s national mapping agency, Survey of India (SoI), has developed an e-platform (https://indiamaps.gov.in/soiapp/ ) that will collect geotagged information on the nation’s critical infrastructure in order to help the Government and public health agencies take critical decisions in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic situation. The platform will have geo-located information of hospitals, testing labs, quarantine camps, containment and buffer zones as well as information on biomedical waste disposal sites. The platform will be further supported through a mobile based application, called SAHYOG, which will work as a key tool in helping community workers carry out the Government’s objectives of door-to-door surveys, contact tracing, deliveries of essentials items and to create focused public awareness campaigns. This platform and app have been created to enhance the efforts of the Government in improving its response system at this crucial time.
The platform is initially expected to strengthen the public health delivery system of the State and Central Governments and subsequently provide the necessary geospatial information support to citizens and agencies dealing with the challenges related to health, socio-economic distress, and livelihood challenges, SoI said in its statement.
State Spatial Data Infrastructure (SSDI) in Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Punjab, and Jammu & Kashmir have been providing collateral standards-based geospatial data services to the State and District Level Authorities in the respective States through State Geoportals for integration with related health data sets towards combating COVID-19 pandemic. This integrated geospatial platform will strengthen the Nation’s health emergency management due to the COVID-19 outbreak and support the socio-economic recovery process through the seamless provision of spatial data, information, and linkage between human, medical, technological, infrastructural and natural resources.
“Integration of demographic information with geospatial data is essential for decision making, governance and development. In the context of COVID-19 spread, this effort will be a special digital enabler for the platforms such as AAROGYA-SETU”, said Prof. Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Science & Technology (DST). DST’s efforts in integrating geospatial information can help the country in taking rapid spatial information-based decisions to face the multilayered crisis that the pandemic and brought and spread the impact of such decisions through the country.
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