How Amazon Web Services is working with Govt to take on the Covid challenge

NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC, set up in partnership with AWS, to work on initiatives like telemedicine, safe air travel and reaching critical supplies to patients and frontline workers

Amazon Web Services (AWS), the cloud computing arm of e-commerce giant Amazon, is working along with the government to enable various innovations in collaboration with startups and other organisations. These are expected to play a critical role to address various societal challenges in the post-covid world.

Last year, AWS partnered with the government think tank NITI Aayog, to establish a Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center (CIC), the first AWS CIC in India, and the 12th AWS CIC in the world. The CIC focuses on addressing societal challenges through digital innovation. It provides an opportunity for non-profit organisations, educational institutions, and government agencies to collaborate with other public sector organisations on their most pressing challenges. This enables them to innovate and test new ideas, and access the technical expertise of AWS.

The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC has been working on multiple initiatives, which are becoming very important to solve various challenges amid the coronavirus pandemic.

One such public challenge of the CIC is the Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem (DYCE). NITI Aayog under the aegis of the CIC, has collaborated with the Digi-Yatra Foundation for the DYCE challenge for Indian startups. 

The aim is to create a solution that provides a frictionless, hassle-free, contact-less, and safe experience to passengers during air travel. For this it would be using real-time selfie-based facial biometric validation. Passenger identification, security, and validation checks take a lot of time. This leads to friction for passengers and their family members traveling with them. Currently, passengers need to go through 4-5 rounds of identity checks before they start their journey.

“While the idea of a Digi Yatra Central Ecosystem was already underway, Covid-19 helped accelerate the whole seamless and contactless way of traveling,” says Kanishka Agiwal, head-service lines, India and South Asia, Amazon Internet Services. 

He said the pandemic has accelerated initiatives like Digi Yatra, which are  going to be completely contactless.Travelers will just have an ID verification on the app on their mobile phone, which will show across multiple checkpoints making it safe, hassle-free, and contactless. “It will also be integrated with the health ID issued based on their vaccination status,” says Agiwal.

After selecting the solutions built by startups, the platform aims to run the pilot starting from October 2021. It will then be scaled to airports in India by the end of 2021 or the beginning of 2022.

When the second wave of Covid-19 impacted India, aid, and support came from international organizations and individual donors.

NITI Aayog also set up a special Covid Taskforce (CTF) that facilitated the import of Covid relief materials into India by domestic and foreign institutions. This included oxygen cylinders, Oxygen concentrators, pharmaceutical products and medicines, PPEs and testing  kits.

The tracking for this was unstructured and manual to a large extent. The aid was not being tracked digitally or centrally. It was being done in silos with a high dependency on individuals tracking it.

“During the second wave of Covid, there was a lot of donor aid that was coming into India from abroad,” says  Agiwal. “It was tracked either at an individual level or in a siloed fashion. Most donors didn’t know whether their contribution actually reached the end beneficiary.

NITI Aayog saw this as a gap and used AWS services to build an application called COvAID to facilitate Covid-19 relief support either in the form of monetary assistance or in kind.

The COvAID platform consolidated the end-to-end flow of aid and enabled visibility on the destination and beneficiaries of the aid. The entire relief distribution pipeline was made visible at a glance. Donors were able to track their consignment and achieve the satisfaction that it has been most gainfully employed.

“It is a completely transparent system for the distribution of foreign aid, laid out to ensure that the states with high active cases receive supplies on a priority basis,” says Agiwal.

Anna Roy, senior Advisor, NITI Aayog said that under the aegis of its Cloud Innovation Centre (CIC), NITI Aayog is implementing several key technology enabled interventions in different sectors in collaboration with AWS. 

“The CIC  enabled NITI to achieve the goal of the Government to leverage emerging technologies to address governance challenges for positive citizen impact,” says Roy. “In addition by actively working with the start-up community it is also supporting the robust innovative ecosystem of the country.”

AWS is also powering Project StepOne, a non-profit technology startup. It works as an integral part of the government work processes and systems to fight Covid. The platform is bringing appropriate telemedicine interventions to bring care to Covid affected citizens. 

StepOne’s workforce consists of a large network of thousands of doctors, medical and dental student volunteers and non-medical volunteers.These volunteers, all of whom are trained on Covid and other protocols they work on - are distributed across the country. They speak in 33 Indian languages enabling a wide coverage of India’s diverse population.

The work to the volunteers is distributed and coordinated via an open-source StepOne technology framework which was developed by a team of technology volunteers at StepOne.This framework is entirely hosted on AWS Cloud.StepOne saw immense scale in the second covid wave. It eventually supported an average of over 1 million calls per day for the months of April and May, 2021.

“We are working on multiple verticals including health-tech and agri-tech,” says Agiwal. “Once we have a minimum viable prototype of a product, then we will roll it out for public consumption.”