As India geared up to fight COVID-19 and the country-wide lockdown came into effect in March 2020, it was a sudden jolt to individuals and businesses. Adapting to remote working and virtual collaboration was (and is) no cake-walk. But for us at Development Logics, being in the grips of the pandemic was much more than just adjusting to the new normal. It was almost like a battle-call.
The State of Himachal Pradesh, where we are headquartered, announced full-fledged curfew on the end of March 2020. But essential service providers and people in emergency situations still needed to travel. This essentially meant that a portal to request, approve, and download Curfew Passes was required on an immediate basis. In close collaboration with the IT Department of the State Government of Himachal Pradesh, we built the Curfew Pass application that went live in just 24 hours. It facilitated the generation of e-pass as a valid permit to move within the State.
When the application was first launched, we were receiving around 7 applications per minute. Towards the end of the lockdown, we were receiving over 100 applications per minute. Thus, this was not just another app that we built – we had to attain high scalability and a stable back-end that could cater to millions of requests and app sessions under extreme timeline crunch.
There was no time to plan a project of this scale and magnitude. But, we weathered the storm by rising up to the crisis and with the aid of dedicated officials from the Government. We would like to acknowledge the contribution by Mr. Rohan Thakur, then Director IT, Mr. Rajeev Sharma, Additional Director IT, Mr. Anil Semwal, Joint Director IT, from the government of Himachal Pradesh for their relentless support, inputs, and encouragement. They were available to us with full commitment whenever we needed them to make critical decisions as product owners, and this made the journey an easy sail. The impact of this project was incredible and that made our team work harder than ever to make life easier for the people of our state.
The applicants needed to fill a form stating the reason for travel, details like timeline and information about anyone accompanying them, identification details, and so on. The applications were automatically sent for approval to the district officials, and on approval, an SMS alert was sent to the applicant. On one hand, it was a moment of pride for us to have been able to contribute in making lives easier for our people. On the other hand, making this feat possible in remote working mode was no easy task. But then, we were just getting started.
Tracking the quarantined population and contact tracing for those affected by COVID-19 was next on the cards for the State Government. Within merely 5 days, we launched the COVID Quarantine App in collaboration with the IT & Health departments of the Government of Himachal Pradesh. The project was the brainchild of Mr. Nipun Jindal, Special Secretary Health Dept, Govt of Himachal Pradesh who deserves a special mention here. The app was loaded with powerful features to track and trace the location of those in quarantine, assign a healthcare worker to each quarantined patient, send automated notifications to healthcare workers in case of quarantine violations and emergencies, and enable administrative staff to easily update data from the back-end. It has successfully tracked nearly 65,000 people and 6,200+ health workers till date. With this we also setup a dedicated help desk, for responding to queries of health workers and people being quarantined.
Given the critical nature of the situation, it was of utmost importance to create an information hub for COVID-19 where people at large could easily access the quarantine app, curfew pass, COVID-related dashboards, updates on new orders by the Government of Himachal Pradesh, and more. This was also essential to have in place as quickly as possible to counter the spread of fake news and de-stress the public. We showcased all pandemic-related information by building a single Government e-portal for COVID-19. This, too, went live in a matter of 4-5 days.
Each of these projects further evolved rapidly during the lockdown. Daily meetings on feature updates & logic changes were held to keep up with the changing requirements of the people and the State. We also took stock of the limitations we faced along the way. The apps were primarily built for Android phones, which means that non-android users lost out on some of the benefits. People without smartphones could not be served with these solutions either. The quality of sensors and inaccuracies in geolocation data were other stumbling blocks we had to workaround. It was not the best solution we could build, but then we were working under tight deadlines. Thankfully between the Department of IT and us, we found another team at Tagbin, which built version 2 of the quarantine app, helping us improve the location tracking features. Would like to thank Saurabh and Ankit from Tagbin for taking up this challenge.
Each member of our team came forward to ensure that the projects are implemented in time. We also collaborated with external teams like the state data center teams and government bodies at a whole new scale due to the sense of urgency involved. Would like to compliment Hitesh and his team at the state data centre for their relentless support in keeping the infra cranked up to achieve the scale we were staring at.
And yes, timely intervention from Rupika, who helped optimize resources for these applications, making the whole experience breezy for the end users. Over 1,00,000 curfew passes were issued in just over a month from the total of 4,00,000+ applications that were received. Accurate movement of live data and high scalability were a few of the aspects that we had to keep up with on the go. It has been an exciting phase for us to juggle these high-priority projects steered forward by the IT department of the State that is progressive and willing to adopt new ways. It was encouraging to see our story being covered by The Tribune India and The Times of India, and we look forward to going onwards and upwards from here in the service of people, communities and organizations.
I would like to thank Rohan Thakur, the then Director IT for reposing trust in our team. There are few bureaucrats who walk the talk. We connected during the Global Investors meet with regards to the IT policy of the state. He actually took that discussion to another level by giving a small upstart in Himachal an opportunity to work on such critical projects. Learnings from here will be of immense value to us and hopefully pave the way for more IT companies to set up base and collaborate with the state government.
In the end I would like to mention the effort put in by my colleagues at Development Logics. Anirban, Vijith, Ramya, Deepti, Pankaj, Mukesh and Yogesh for spending countless hours building these applications and then supporting them since the last couple of months.