How apps developed by IT department helping maintain social distancing in HP
To facilitate people of the state during lockdown and curfew, the IT department played a vital role to provide contactless services and to maintain social distancing even within the government offices.
The department has developed and implemented various IT applications to facilitate residents and administration during the coronavirus lockdown.
The idea of these apps is to maintain social distancing and contactless services amongst the public and even with government officials. The government at various levels is using the technology platforms provided by the IT department for gathering information, monitoring and decision-making in an efficient manner said Rohan Chand, director of the IT department.
To provide efficient and digitised facilities to people, Covid curfew ePass application was developed. This application has been beneficial in reducing physical interaction and applicants can get e-pass online through a link sent via SMS. So far 4,75,529 applications have been received and about 1,57,990 e-Passes have been issued after scrutiny and verification.
To facilitate the interstate movement of HP residents stranded in other states and likewise people of other states stranded in Himachal Pradesh, now such persons can also apply for e-Pass at http://covidepass.hp.gov.in. Officials said that Covid curfew ePass has proved a boon to a large number of persons stranded in different parts of the country.
To further strengthen this, state nodal officer and state joint nodal officer along with other nodal officers have been appointed to collect, collate and compile the data pertaining to the requests received for interstate movement and formulation of a comprehensive plan, devise protocol and facilitate the movement of people.
For maintaining the record of quarantined persons, a health worker has been assigned to each quarantined person, to track the violation of quarantined location by Covid-19 suspects and generate alerts in case of violations, the department has developed the Covid Quarantine App (http://covid19.hp.gov.in).
Corona Mukt Himachal Mobile App is also part of this system which is to be installed on the mobile phone of a quarantined person. It has the facility of locking the quarantine location, so that alerts are generated in case of violations. Besides this, the training of health officials (NHM, DSOs and BMOs) was done by the IT department at districts and block levels through video conference. The data of about 445 quarantined persons has already been entered.
To provide a common place for all government orders, advisories and media bulletins to avoid any misinformation or rumour, the department has developed ‘Covid Government Orders’ available on http://covidorders.hp.gov.in.
An application has also been developed for monitoring law and order related issues across the state. An application has been developed to monitor the law and order related issues across the state. The application named ‘Law and Order Monitoring and Reporting System’ provides facility to superintendents of police and police stations for uploading law and order related information, as desired by the Union ministry of home affairs and consolidate the same on the portal and make the same available to the state government, director-general of police, SPs and SHOs.
Each police station is required to report law and order related status on the portal four times a day and six-hourly report daily containing the number of violations of lockdown/curfew, arrests made, vehicles seized, FIRs registered, fines imposed and law and order incidents reported including preventive actions taken.