Karnataka's COVID-19 war room was awarded the Centre's e-governance 'jury' award for the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in the management of the pandemic.
IAS officer Munish Moudgil, who was the special officer in-charge of the state COVID-19 war room, received the award from Union Minister Dr Jitendra Singh during the two-day 24th National Conference on e-governance held at Hyderabad, on Friday.
State health minister Dr K Sudhakar tweeted, "Be it the gamut of in-house mobile applications or the fully equipped war room, Karnataka’s tech-driven COVID management has been a model to the entire country. Congratulations to Mr. Manish Moudgil and the team for winning the award."
When the pandemic broke out in the first week of March 2020, Bengaluru leveraged its technological prowess. While the state devised several mobile apps for COVID-19 management, it was Moudgil's initiative of developing the two apps—Quarantine Watch (for surveillance of primary and secondary contacts of the confirmed cases) and Corona Watch (to track the movement history of Covid patients) that gave Karnataka an early edge in combating the pandemic. The former helped in reducing the need for manual surveillance of primary and secondary contacts of the confirmed cases.
When home quarantine violations had turned into a big headache for the administration, the Quarantine Watch app with GPS tag helped in surveillance of the primary and secondary contacts under home quarantine. Every hour the person under quarantine was to send a selfie to the control room.
The Corona Watch, on the other hand, provided the citizens real-time information about the virus and its hotspots. The app showed the location of Corona affected patients and their movement history of 14 days prior to the testing.
Moudgil, a 1998 batch IAS officer from Odisha cadre (later shifted to Karnataka cadre) and an IIT Bombay alumnus, has a track record of having introduced innovative apps for better governance. He has previously developed apps like "Dishaank" that helps in streamlining land records and land identification, and "Parihara" to help remove duplication of the names of the beneficiaries in the database used for crop loss compensation.
