Rohan Chand Thakur IAS, Director, IT, Himachal Pradesh
Himachal making innovative use of IT to curb COVID-19 spread: Director IT
Raju William
Shimla, March 31, 2020: Department of Information Technology (IT), Himachal Pradesh has developed and implemented for use various IT Applications to maintain social distancing and facilitate contactless services during lockdown for the citizens and the government machinery to counter Coronavirus.
According to Rohan Chand Thakur, Director IT, Himachal Pradesh, his department has, so far, rolled out four major IT driven Apps across the state to facilitate, firstly, Covid Government Orders to provide a common place for all Government Orders, Advisories and Media Bulletins to avoid any misinformation or rumours. It offers facility to Secretariat and District Level Officers to upload Covid-19 related notifications at a single place to make them available to the citizens.
Notably, this application was developed in just one day and rolled out on March 27, 2020. More than 150 notifications are already available on the portal, added Thakur who is leading the team of IT experts working overtime to develop such applications to provide real time solutions to the COVID-19 related problems in the state.
Secondly, Covid Curfew ePass facility provides contactless services enabling the citizens to apply online for Curfew Pass and respective District Administration to issue the Pass online. No physical interaction required at any level and applicants gets ePass online over a link sent through SMS. The application was developed in 2 days and made available to the public on 29th March, 2020. Already more than 20000 applications have been received and about 1100 ePasses have been issued after security and verification by district administration.
Third important one is Covid Quarantine App (http://covid19.hp.gov.in) which has been developed to keep record of the quarantined persons, assign a Health Worker to each quarantined person, to track the violation of quarantined location by Covid-19 suspects and generate alerts in case of violations. Corona Mukt Himachal Mobile App is also a part of this system which is to be installed on the mobile phone of quarantines person. It has the facility of locking the quarantine location so that alerts are generated in case of violations.
Thakur informed that this application was also developed in 2 days and made available to Health Department on 27th March, 2020. The training of Health officials (NHM, DSOs & BMOs) was done by Department of IT at Districts and Block levels through Video Conference. The data of about 450 quarantined persons has already been entered.
Fourthly, the App related to Law & Order Monitoring & Reporting System provides facility to SPs and Police Stations to upload Law & Order related information, as desired by MHA Government of India, and consolidate the same on the portal and make the same available to State Government, DGP, SPs and SHOs. Each Police Station is required to report Law & Order related status on the portal 4 times a day (6 hourly report daily) containing number of violations of Lockdown/ Curfew, arrests made, vehicles seized, FIRs registered, fines imposed and Law & Order incidents reported including Preventive actions taken etc.
This application was also developed in a single day and implemented on March 29, 2020.
Thakur went to add that apart from above applications, department is actively involved in facilitating the video conference of the Chief Minister CM with DCs from time to time, which takes place almost on daily basis at 4PM. In order to encourage social distancing within the department, extensive use of e- Office for file processing, for Skype for meetings and Social Media for communications is being done by the staff.