A lot can be done with Data for Social Good in India

Gautam Banerjee
Managing Director, Business Brio

There is a lot of data which is getting generated across different spheres of life. So from a holistic perspective every day we are generating tons and tons of data. For a Country like India there is a lot that we can do with data for the social good. So one of the things that comes into my mind is disaster management, when there is an earthquake happens it has always been a challenge to locate the survivors and how to drop food packets. Helicopters generally take contingencies during this time. Now the point is where will be the helicopters will be going, what kind of contingencies will helicopters be caring because if there is a particular area where there are lots of child along with their mothers are there then the kind of contingencies that have to be dropped will be different than the area where most of the males have accumulated.  So these are the things which basically can be tracked through the signal of active GSM phone. So whether you have a data card or a normal SIM card, so by accessing the data at a macro level where there is no possibility of data breach or a privacy breach you can actually understand the movement of people and then the cluster of the people getting formed and according you can plan the dispatch of the helicopters along with contingencies. This was done in an earthquake which hit us in Uttarakhand sometime back. It was extensively used in Nepal earthquake.