After a successful pilot in Tamil Nadu, the government has started a pan-India tele-survey to reach people without smartphones to conduct a Covid-19-related search and trace potential cases of the disease.
Calls will be placed from the phone number 1921, asking people questions about symptoms of the disease.
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The tele-survey, announced late on Tuesday, will be done by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), and is intended to help the government detect areas where the Coronavirus has spread. An interactive voice response system (IVRS), back-ended by a NIC team, will be rolled out. Analysis of call data will be done by other wings of the government, said officials.
A senior official of the IT ministry said the tele-survey is expected to reach out to 900 million feature phone users across the country. Officials said of the 1.2 billion mobile phone users in India, only 350 million have smart phones.
“Just as the Aarogya Setu is reaching out to smartphone users, the tele-survey will collect details from feature phone users,” an official said on condition of anonymity.
{{/usCountry}}“Just as the Aarogya Setu is reaching out to smartphone users, the tele-survey will collect details from feature phone users,” an official said on condition of anonymity.
{{/usCountry}}The call will lead to successive prompts for SMSes on the user’s feature phone, and seek answers to a set menu of questions. The systems are being readied and will be rolled out by the weekend, officials said.
The service will be available in languages such as Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi.
The tele-survey was initially piloted in Tamil Nadu a fortnight ago with the help of the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, simultaneously when the IT ministry was rolling out Aarogya Setu.
Another ministry official, wishing anonymity, told HT the pilot was successful and helped authorities find the next area of spread. “It helped us find the next red zone or containment zone,” said the official.
During the pilot, 15,000 people were screened through the tele-survey, helping authorities finalise a list of people suspected to be infected by the Coronavirus. “State authorities would then reach out to them for necessary action,” said an official.
The number 1921 was selected as the number 1922 is a toll-free service for people to listen to the prime minister’s popular radio programme, Mann ki Baat, the first official quoted above said.
In a statement, the government said calls placed to mobile phones are aimed to “enable proper feedback of the prevalence and distribution of Covid symptoms”. It added, “Please be aware of any other calls by pranksters or or calls from any other number in the guise of such similar survey.”
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