Smart mobility and ride-hailing services are proving crucial in dealing with the Covid-19 crisis. Be it deployment of frontline workers or ensuring delivery of essentials, urban mobility is playing a significant role. Ola, one of the biggest ride-hailing companies in India, is providing its technology platform and capabilities to governments and public sector organizations across the country to tackle with Covid-19 pandemic. The new Ola Connects (COmprehensive Navigation, NEtworking, Control and Tracking Solution) can be customized as per specific requirements.
The platform can be refurbished so that government and other organizations can get real-time access to war rooms. It can track millions of vehicles and people and also includes a feature that can be used to ascertain whether or not people are wearing masks. The company is making efforts to ensure data privacy and security.
User activity can be restricted to specific zones with alerting mechanisms on deviation through Geofencing Controls. Other capabilities include , Real-time Alert System and Crowd and Flow Management, which will enable Scheduling, Flow control and planning capabilities to support social distancing norms.
Ola CONNECTS can be replicated across various use cases including Emergency and Healthcare Support, Supply Chain Management, Law Enforcement, Frontline Resource Deployment, Incident and Information Response, and War-Room Management amongst others.
Ola has also collaborated with the Government of Punjab to provide officials with a medium to effectively track and manage over 17 lakh farmers’ produce and their vehicle movement into Mandis across the state while following the current social distancing norms. Working closely with the Punjab Government, Ola has shared its technology capabilities to provide a direct channel to pass authentic information to the farmers including distribution of security travel passes digitally thus eliminating the need of physical distribution which happens at large gatherings.
“By opening up Ola CONNECTS to various state governments and public service organizations across the country, we are able to offer a ready to deploy technology solution that addresses unique challenges in the various relief initiatives that are underway. All of Ola’s innovations across AI, tracking technologies, allocation and flow management are part of the CONNECTS platform. We are committed to serving the nation in every way possible and are offering this platform free of cost, dedicated to the hundreds of thousands of doctors, healthcare professionals and frontline staff leading our fight against COVID-19”, says Pranay Jivrajka, Co-Founder, Ola.
