Nexus of Good: Saving lives, shaping lives

This young ITS Officer, Navin Jhakar, of 2014 batch and proud recipient of Nexus of Good Annual Award proved that age doesn't matter in the pursuit of innovation and excellence. He was instrumental in designing innovative and indigenous ICT solutions for quarantine management of Covid-positive individuals and curbing the spread of the pandemic by ensuring real-time logistics management of medical oxygen supply that contributed in ensuring the well-being of 1.4 billion Indians.

To contain the spread of Covid-19 pandemic, countries across the globe had enforced strict-measures like lockdowns, isolation, keeping Covid-positive individuals under quarantine in institutional set-up etc. India started taking proactive steps for containment of Covid-19 by screening individuals coming to India from abroad and advising them home or institutional quarantine. With the initial rise of Covid cases from March 24, 2020, the nation went under an unprecedented complete lockdown.

For monitoring of patients under quarantine, district administration and state government authorities started using GPS-based applications to ascertain whether the persons who have been instructed to stay in quarantine are adhering to the instructions or not. There were following limitations of these applications: firstly, these applications worked only for smartphones. Non-smartphone users, especially daily-wage-earners, are the ones who are most prone to Covid due to their potential proximity to other individuals to earn for their livelihood, shelter and food. Approximately 55 crore Indian telecom subscribers still use feature phones. Secondly, considering the requirement of real-time checking of geo fence, the user intervention should be kept to zero while these applications are heavily dependent on the end user for enabling the location and sometimes uploading the pictures, which may lead to concealment of information. Moreover, there was no integrated system at the national level for quarantine management.

In a country like India with a huge population, the spread of Covid would have caused mass destruction of life on already burdened, limited healthcare infrastructure. Thus, a team of ITS officers in the Department of Telecommunications envisaged the important role of telecom for assisting the state governments and district administration in enforcing home quarantine. The research work to formulate and implement a tech savvy solution started in the second week of March 2020. After analysing the number of smartphone and feature phone users in the Indian telecom market and probable solutions like GPS-based applications, wristband-based monitoring and telecom network-based monitoring for quarantine geo-fence, the team started designing an indigenous solution for checking not only the real-time locations of quarantined people but also for checking whether the quarantine is breached or not, and that too without any end user intervention. That is how CQAS (Covid-19 Quarantine Alert System) was conceptualised. CQAS uses Big Data Analytics and Geographical Information System (GIS) mapping platforms for real-time quarantine monitoring of COVID positive patients and mild cases. It tracks the breach of geo-fence when the person moves away from his/her quarantine location and automatically triggers SMS/email alerts to the authorised government agency. CDOT – the R&D organisation of DoT and Telecom Service Providers (TSPs) have also played a key role in the successful implementation of CQAS.

CQAS is a national-level project, and since its inception on March 29, 2020, it has been working 24x7. It has been utilised by 18 state governments till date, handling more than 36 lakh targets, generating more than 21 crore quarantine breach alerts and being instrumental in containment of Covid-19 pandemic. CQAS has played a pivotal role in effectively utilising the law enforcement and healthcare human resources in the fight against Covid-19 pandemic. It is worth mentioning that CQAS, as a complete solution, has incurred zero cost in its implementation.

During the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic, the country witnessed an outbreak of the Delta variant, with a high mortality rate and significant drop in SpO2 level in the patients. The need for medical oxygen rose exponentially. There was no existing mechanism to track the real time transportation of medical oxygen supply. So, Government of India launched a web- and app-based Oxygen Digital Tracking System (ODTS) on April 30, 2021 midnight to enable real time tracking of oxygen movement in the country. The front end of ODTS was developed by MoRTH and MEITY.

There were two critical issues with the monitoring of oxygen transportation – either the trucks were not having fitted GPS or if they were, they were proprietary in nature, without any interface or API for information sharing.

DoT's CQAS team rose to the challenge again. Keeping the core architecture of CQAS intact, a new module was developed in CQAS, and API-based connectivity to ODTS was provided to handle the above stated issues.

The mobile numbers of the driver/helper of the vehicle are made use of. CQAS fetches real-time location of the oxygen tankers every 15 minutes and sends it to the ODTS server through API-based connectivity. Through CQAS-powered ODTS, more than 42,000 tankers at a peak average of 400 oxygen tankers per day have been monitored, carrying 5.4 lakh metric tonnes of medical oxygen. The team of Cargo Exchange has played a key role in successful implementation of ODTS. Cargo Exchange, an Indian tech-organisation, is a real time cloud-based Transportation Exchange Platform (TEP) designed to automate the end-to-end transportation activities in the supply chain.

The team also conceptualised and did a pilot implementation of AI-powered DRISHTI for ensuring social distancing norms, detecting face mask violations and crowd management. DRISHTI is an AI-based system having tri-Netras (three digital eyes) – first for detecting social distancing violations, second for face mask-related violations and third for checking the count of persons present at a public place to maintain gathering within permissible limits. DRISHTI is an AI-driven indigenous, innovative and plug & play solution relying on real-time image recognition and video processing.

An exponential rise in the cases of financial frauds and cyber-crimes was witnessed during the pandemic. SIMs subscribed to forged/fake documents were involved in financial frauds, cyber-crimes, extortion etc., owing to anonymity and untraceability of such SIMs.

Such syndicates are a direct threat to national security and public law & order. National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report has revealed that India recorded 50,035 cases of cyber-crime in 2020, with an 11.8 per cent surge in such offences over the previous year. In terms of motive, the maximum 60.2 per cent cyber-crimes lodged in 2020 were done for fraud (30,142 out of 50,035 cases).

A team of ITS Officers in DoT took the challenge of curbing the menace of cyber-crimes and financial frauds through proactive identification of the fake/forged SIMs. The team has conceptualized and designed the NextGen tool ASTR (अस्त्र), leveraging artificial intelligence and face recognition. The vision of ASTR project is to analyse and cleanse the complete SIM database of the country by identifying non-bonafide mobile numbers even before they carry out any cyber fraud and the case reporting by LEAs. ASTR has proved to be so successful that the entire space of cyber-crime syndicates of hotspots Mewat and Jamtara has been neutralised, disconnecting 6.5 lakh SIMs across all TSPs in just six months.

It is the inspiring leadership of Mahesh Shukla ITS, member of Digital Communication Commission, that led to these innovations. These projects are the brainchild of Naveen Jakhar. He was instrumental in conceptualizing these indigenous, innovative projects. The entire team comprising R Shakya, PK Singh, Amit Singhal, Atul Sinha, Rajiv Kumar Goyal, Rajiv Kumar, Atul Joshi, Pranay Diwakar and Biren Karmakar — which played a key role in different phases of implementation of these projects — deserves to be complimented as it presented a wonderful example of Nexus of Good.

Views expressed are personal