BENGALURU: The country’s IT capital on Friday won the Covid Innovation Award for developing INDEX Application for Covid Management under the Smart Cities Mission.
The ministry of housing and urban affairs gave the award during the mission’s sixth anniversary in New Delhi.
According to BBMP officials, the application was designed to access information on Covid-19 positive cases from the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) portal, provide user interface to zonal command centres and all field teams for action and implementation of tasks.
It reduced monitoring time from 24 hours to near real-time.
BH Anil Kumar, who was BBMP commissioner when the app was developed, said there was a delay in getting information from the ICMR portal and identifying positive patients requiring hospitalisation.
The app simplified the system and helped save hundreds of lives, even during the second Covid wave, he said.
‘System up in under 15 days’Hephsiba Rani Korlapati, then special officer of BBMP Covid-19 war room and then MD, Bengaluru Smart City Limited, said that as infections increased in mid-June 2020, they put up a patient management system in less than 15 days.
“In July 2020, there was a huge improvement with support of data scientists from the Indian Institute of Science.
Index application was the outcome of agile planning and seamless data integration.
The objective was to reduce fatalities and keep Bengaluru safe,” she said.