NITI Aayog reaches out to IT majors to train healthcare workers

NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant has reached out to IT majors like Microsoft, Wipro, SAP and Nasscom asking them to come up with technologies that can help in rolling out training modules for health workers and ventilator operators. Kant was chairing the empowered committee on strategizing ways to combat the spread of COVID-19.

“There is an increasing need to not only leverage smartphones but also feature phones in accelerating the process of contact tracing and identification of hotspots in the country,” principle scientific advisor K VijayRaghavan, who is member of the empowered committee, said

Meeting was attended by Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh, Wipro chairman Rishad Premji, Microsoft India president Anant Maheshwari, Sindhu Gangadharan, MD of SAP Labs India and Rahul Sharma, president, Amazon Internet Services, amongst others.

Briefing the empowered committee, Nasscom president Debjani Ghosh said that Nasscom has created a special task force which is focusing on utilising data and technology for management of COVID-19 and has launched an online directory of all its actions.

Microsoft India, on the other hand, said it is helping mobilise volunteers from various NGOs working actively to help contain the spread of COVID-19 through Kaizala app with multilingual capabilities.

While SAP Labs India said it is involved in augmenting healthcare systems, working with NGOs and UN agencies and launching a platform to connect suppliers along with assisting the government in building predictive models, the Wipro Group told the empowered committee that it is presently involved in utilising its infrastructure for cooked meals, isolation beds, food, medicine and providing personal protective equipments.

Kant-led committee is one of the 11 committees set up by the prime minister on Sunday under the Disaster Management Act for planning and ensuring quick implementations of decisions taken to check the spread of fatal coronavirus.

The committee comprises principal scientific advisor K VijayRaghavan, National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) member Kamal Kishore and CBIC member Sandeep Mohan Bhatnagar besides officials from the Prime Minister’s Office and the home ministry.