What happens when
disaster strikes? The answer depends, among other things, on where you are
located. And if you live in a third-world, hot, crowded and messy country like
India—all hell breaks loose.
Millions among India’s
billion-plus citizens have seen that hell from up, close and personal: in the
ruthless form of floods, earthquakes, cloudbursts, landslides and other
disasters that destroy lives, livestock and the lock, stock and barrels that
help people sustain their existence.
In fact, as I write
these lines, the country is in the midst of disastrous rains and flooding in
several states across its length and breadth.
On such occasions, the
administration goes into an overdrive, the army and paramilitary forces are
called in and the voluntary organizations are roped in for relief work. But Nature’s
fury often proves too much and, despite all their efforts and hard work, the
scale at which misery unfolds in the aftermath is astounding.
Can technology play a
role in anticipating, mitigating, controlling and managing this misery? And if
so, to what extent and in what ways?
Those were the
questions that came flooding to my mind as I attended the launch recently of a white
paper titled “Internet of Things (IoT) for Effective Disaster Management.” The
paper was brought out by Digital India Action Group (DIAG), a think tank set up
by IT vendor lobby group MAIT for “ideating and monitoring policy initiatives
to support the Indian Government’s mission of Digital India.”
The objective of the paper
is “to create awareness and appreciation about the potential use and
applications of IoT for different aspects of disaster management.”
Alongside, DIAG also
released another white paper, “Aadhaar-Enablement: A Framework for
Citizen-Centric Services”.
For the uninitiated,
Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identity issued by the Government’s Unique ID
Authority of India. Over 1 billion of these IDs have been given thus far in
what is billed as the largest such exercise in the world.
While discussing
Aadhaar and the potential of Aadhaar-based services is a Pandora’s box in
itself, let me confine myself to IoT in disaster management for this post.
The role of IoT in
disaster management, in keeping with the huge potential of this
mother-of-all-technological-paradigm, is critical and wide-ranging. A
multiplicity of agencies, infrastructure, devices, policies, and applications,
among others, must come together to make the whole exercise “effective”, as the
DIAG paper rightly highlights in its title.
The presence of a
cross-section of officials and executives—from government, industry and
consulting organizations (see pic)—is, one hopes, symbolic of the coordinated,
on-ground effort that will be required in the days to come to give actual shape
to the vision laid out in the document.
The IoT white paper
recommends a “Seven-Point Action Plan” to shift from a “relief and recovery”
model to “risk and vulnerability assessment” and address key issues and
challenges related to management of natural and man-made disasters in India.
According to data from
the IoT white paper, as much as 57% land area of India is vulnerable to
earthquakes; 12% of this area is vulnerable to severe earthquakes. Besides, 68%
land is vulnerable to drought, 12% land vulnerable to floods and 8%, to cyclones.
The paper notes that many cities in India are also vulnerable to chemical,
industrial and other man-made disasters.
The benefits of IoT in
disaster management are easy to visualize (though difficult to implement, given
the current realities of India): agencies can gain a clear picture of
operations with real-time visibility of data as well as model data from
multiple sources. This can further be transformed into accessible, actionable
intelligence for faster, better-informed decisions. It is important, therefore,
to create “a single, federated information hub.”
The paper calls for
building an information backbone which all parties—government agencies, NGOs,
infrastructure operators and community—can contribute to and work from.
One term in the paper
that specifically caught my eye was “intuitive analytics” which seems to take
the capabilities of the current big data analytics technologies to their
optimal level.
In this context, SAP’s
Lovneesh Chanana presented an insightful video of the city of Buenos Aires in
Argentina. After the disastrous floods in the year 2013, which resulted in loss
of close to a hundred lives and millions of dollars, the Argentine capital
decided to put sensors in over 30,000 storm drains that measure, as per this report on the SAP site, “the direction, level and speed of water.”
One of the key technologies to gather and analyze this huge amount of data in
real-time is SAP HANA.
Technologies lie SAP
HANA (or IBM Watson, for that matter) are not cheap to deploy for funds-starved
governments. But consider the impact of not using the most advanced
technologies: A World Bank forecast puts the annual losses from floods alone to
reach as high as $1 trillion worldwide if cities don’t take preventive
measures.
Each city, in my
opinion, will need to take a deep view of what’s the best fit for it in terms
of technologies, including IoT and the use of social platforms such as Twitter
and Facebook. (If you think lightly of the idea, pause for a moment to consider
that the US Geological Survey, a government entity, runs a service called the Tweet Earthquake Dispatch (TED). Under this, there are two Twitter accounts that send out earthquake
alerts: @USGSted and @USGSBigQuakes.)
I remember reading a
report a few years ago that was in a way precursor to the TED service. When, in
the US, a 5.9-magnitude earthquake shook the Northeast in 2011, many New
Yorkers learned about it on Twitter—seconds before
the shaking actually started. Tweets from people at the epicenter near
Washington, D.C., outpaced the quake itself, providing a unique early warning
system. (Conventional alerts, by contrast, were said to take two to 20 minutes
to be issued.)
Technology is
advancing at a much faster pace now, especially with machine learning, robotics
and drones appearing more frequently in headlines than ever before.
What should the Indian
government and industry players be doing in tackling disasters with IoT and
other tools?
The DIAG white paper
gives some recommendations, the MAIT DIAG Seven-Point Action Plan, which
includes:
- Release of cloud
security and related guidelines as part of the Digital India policy framework.
- Inclusion of ICT in
Disaster Management in the National Skills Development Framework and Plan.
- Release of IoT
Policy for India.
- Development of
framework for continuous industry participation in planning for disaster management.
- Back-end
applications for asset management with disaster management authorities.
- Knowledge portal for
sharing experiences and best practices.
- A comprehensive plan
for prevention of cyber disasters.
Even if some of the
above points are put into practice by a government-industry “action tank”
(taking the think part to its logical conclusion), the disasters that
certainly, unavoidably await the Indian multitudes can perhaps be mitigated and
managed much better than before.
For CIOs, tech leaders
and others who would like to dig deeper or get involved, here are some
reference links:
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