Started in 2009, in Panaji, Goa by two IIT Kanpur alumni, Amarsh Chaturvedi and Ashwani Rawat, Transerve Technologies is a technology leader in the field of location-intelligence for effective decision making. Having been acknowledged as a top emerging and innovative company by NASSCOM and Deloitte, its spatial platform Transerve Online Stack is now being leveraged for large scale social impact by various government departments. To help the country fight COVID 19, Transerve has come up with two solutions using spatial analytics:
1.Mobility Tracking: With the rising number of COVID positive cases engulfing the Indian sub-continent, it has become quite a challenge for the Government to keep a track of patients and especially those residing in the contaminated zones. The need of the hour is for the Government to have direct access to track the movement of people. This is where the police enforcement is required to monitor not only the movement of people but also, vehicles delivering essential goods in the containment zone. Transerve Technologies which specializes in location intelligence using geospatial technology as a tool has come up with a proposed solution to support the Government in these testing times.
The proposed solution will be a digital system to issue movement passes through a mobile app and a Command & Control Center (CCC) to track geo-locations of vehicles/people with passes in real-time. This will also enable essential service providers (ESPs) to ensure safe passage while at the same time the Police department can track their movement. And if anyone is seen disregarding the process will be flagged upon movement during unauthorized zones and beyond timings.
2.Route Optimization: The company has come up with a solution to help businesses increase delivery efficiency amid the COVID crisis. As businesses are planning to come back stronger, geospatial technology to map Covid19 density zones can help them in planning their business operations. By providing accurate mapping of COVID19 cases and containment zones, ‘Transerve Technologies’ through its offering ‘Transerve Online Stack (TOS)’ is tracking, monitoring, analyzing, and visually representing geo-spatial data, thus, assisting businesses and fleet operations to take statistically driven smart decisions using Route Optimization.
In our quest to explore the solutions more, we engaged into an interaction with Ashwani Rawat, Co-Founder & Director, Transerve Technologies.
Q. What was the idea behind Transerve?
A. Transerve is a Civic Technology firm, which specializes in geospatial technology. Considering the increasing penetration of smartphone and data connectivity across the globe, the rate of spatial data creation has gone up tremendously. According to Forbes in 2017, half of the internet search was conducted through smartphones almost all of which has GPS device. There are millions of applications collecting spatial information but don’t know how and where to analyze or how and when to monetize that information. In 2017 the world was generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day and some analyst claims that 80% of the data has location content. Looking at these mind boggling numbers, we realized that there is dire need of a platform easy to operate and process spatial data on regular basis thus the founders contrived together the foundation of Transerve Online Stack which is SaaS based location Intelligence platform helping companies to draw insights from the data automatically. The platform fills the vacuum in the market which cannot afford to implement expensive enterprise GIS solutions as well require to develop in-house expertise.
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Q. How are you leveraging location intelligence for making a large scale social impact?
A. At Transerve, we see “social impact” as our core focus area. The goal of organization is to develop AI assisted decision making platform for City administrator to efficiently carry out city operation using geospatial technology. Power of maps and geospatial technology has been well established as a process enabler for large-scale or regional applications. While GIS is increasingly penetrating the Indian market in all possible sectors, its affordability, ease of use and deployment has been a major concern.
Hence a cloud-based SaaS solution which is ready-to-use and has built-in business rules for city functions like property tax, water supply, sewerage asset management and even sludge disposal system is quite unique and user-friendly. We have built proprietary technology to leverage geospatial content like raster and vector datasets (including drone images) for these tasks.
Having seed-funded by IIM Ahmedabad, and now has Omidyar Network and Tara India Fund as our marquee social impact early-stage investors. The key sector that we are focusing on is the Urban Sector. Our product portfolio includes tools to improve revenue collection, water and sanitation optimization, mobile app-based citizen portals, spatial analytics, utility management to name a few.
Our technology has helped cities manage their assets and operations to provide better citizen services and helps them evaluate the city’s progress and development using liveability indicators across 21 areas including the environment, slum rehabilitation, property tax, utilities, assets, disaster management, estate management, parks, roads and more. In fact, our GIS and machine learning-based stack called Transerve Online Stack (TOS) is designed for Indian cities with complex setup. The solution is scalable and can remodel cities in digital form based on as things are on-ground, which helps in running scenarios to assist decision-makers in finding the impact of their policies and projects.
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Take, for instance, Transerve have executed projects to streamline the revenue generated from property tax by using TOS in four cities in Uttar Pradesh. We focus on municipal body operations such as enhancing tax collection to make ULBs (urban local bodies) sustainable by using machine learning and pressing issues like faecal sludge management using geo-information systems for towns and cities that cannot afford expensive sewerage system.
We have also come up with solutions to support businesses which are trying to get their operations back on track through ‘Transerve Online Stack’ (TOS), to help mapping Covid-19 density zones using geospatial technology. This advanced solution works on predictive analysis and uses layers of geospatial data to track, monitor, analyze, and visually represent them into data stacks. These data stacks will help in route optimization in Covid positive zones that can further assist businesses in making statistically-driven decisions. Our technologically advanced API-based spatial platform serves as a single point database to access all the information related to COVID 19 contaminated zones. With our platform, we aim at providing a helping hand to government authorities and corporates, so that the society can reap benefits on a larger scale. Moreover, analyzing data of existing health infrastructure and census data sets and mapping it to those infected can help policymakers and concerned authorities in identifying COVID 19 containment zones. With so many practical applications, TOS is emerging to be a very effective tool for governments and corporates. TOS has been maintaining a Corona timeline and created interactive digital maps of all the districts in India, and color-coded them to map all the COVID 19 related information. We are also publishing map visualizations on COVID 19 related data released by government sources from time-to-time in order to help the public in understanding the infection and its containment.
Q. How many organizations have benefitted from the Transerve TOS platform so far?
A. The platform has been used by organizations with country wide presence. Currently we are supporting more than 50 organizations on daily basis to manage their spatial datasets. Our platform is enabling the organizations to draw insights from spatial datasets and sharing it among various stakeholders. Transerve technology aims at increasing the efficiency of business operations and increasing the bottom line for the companies by helping them in managing tasks through location intelligence at decentralized nodes.
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Q. How is Transerve helping the Government to fight against COVID 19?
A. We at Transerve came up with ‘Geospatial Sewerage Surveillance’ model which offers community-based group testing with routine monitoring of sewage as a non-invasive early warning tool. In fact, wastewater testing can also be used as an early warning sign if the virus returns.
This surveillance model can not only be useful as an early warning sign for COVID but also for future outbreaks as well. This model has been successfully implemented in detecting illegal drug use in Australia, to eradicate polio in Israel, track salmonella outbreaks in Hawaii, to name a few. In India, where approximately 38% of households dispose of their wastes into septic tanks and 33% of households are connected to a piped sewer system. The proposed Geospatial Sewerage Surveillance solution has the potential to cover this 70% of households for tracing early signs of infection. Built on a cloud-based tool ‘Transerve Online Stack’, this solution tracks the movement of Faecal Sludge Management (FSM) by collecting data using spatial analytics, location on mobile devices, and studying the patterns over time and geography.
Q. How has Transerve’s business been impacted by COVID?
A. Like most of the other businesses, COVID crises have impacted our business too. But the brighter side is that it has led us to re-think about the situation and made us more determined to keep committed for the innovation. We have invested in R&D more than ever during last 6 months in aligning our product to various market verticals. We have moved from process-based architecture to value-based architecture in this year. Our technology is now available on SaaS model with 1800 ready datasets for our users for analyzing the market using location intelligence.
Q. What are the future plans?
A. Transerve will be shortly releasing a unified urban platform covering the entire urban landscape, utilizing open standards; to offer a non-proprietary platform that can be used by any city across the globe. We are targeting implementation into more than 250 ULBs in 2020 and in 5 large corporates. We are currently working with Big Fours to implement the solution globally. Transerve is also appending their technology with industry standard products in domain of Building plan approval system and Municipal ERP’s with partnerships with industry leaders.
