An IAS cadre who is trying to make a difference for the people of Mizoram

A small place in Lunglei district of Mizoram named Hnahthial, this place received its first accessible ATM machine only last year due to the proactive services of a 30-yr-old 2012 AGMUT (Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram & UTs) cadre IAS, Kannan Gopinathan from Kerala, who is currently serving the people of Hnahthial in the Northeastern state of Mizoram.And now, Kannan is all set to launch a disaster management app for the people of Mizoram.

Owing to the recent earthquake that struck the region, it cannot be denied that the entire Northeastern region is placed upon an area of high seismic activity. Moreover, perpetual rainfall accompanied by landslides and roadblocks are a common problem without any concrete solution. Hence managing a disaster becomes a major part of work profile of any bureaucrat rendering his services here.

Speaking to Shweta Raj Kanwar for TNT- The Northeast Today, Kannan Gopinathan talks about the issues in the region that require attention and the various hurdles that inflict a policy executor and how the region motivated him to develop a useful disaster management application in just a period of one month.

Kannan Gopinathan is a 2012 batch AGMUT cadre IAS from Kerala. He did his schooling from Kottayam, Kerala and engineering from BIT Mesra, Ranchi in Electrical Engineering. He later joined Freescale Semiconductors (previously Motorola) at Noida in 2007.

Playing drums, djembe etc. are his hobbies and he also loves football, cricket and badminton. During his stay in Noida, he worked in an NGO called AID-Noida, teaching children from a slum community. He later quit the company in 2011 to appear for civil services. He then joined IAS in AGMU (Arunachal, Goa, Mizoram & UTs) cadre in 2012.

Here are extracts from the interview with TNT- the Northeast Today:

TNT: Tell us about your association with Mizoram.

Kannan: I came to Mizoram on my first posting in September 2014. I got my first posting as SDO (Civil) of Hnahthial sub-division. Hnahthial is a sub-division in Lunglei district which is famous as Jeje's (Footballer) home place. I Really cherish my days at Hnahthial.

TNT: What inspired you to come up with the idea of developing this application?

Kannan: Two incidents triggered the idea for an app. Aizawl is divided into 19 zones and one officer assigned in each zone to deal with disaster related incidents. After the recent earthquake that struck us, many people I met asked how we know about our zonal officer. Initially we thought of just putting this app on our website but that was not very helpful. Later, we thought of locating my zonal officer app based on location to help citizen connect to their zonal officers immediately.

Another thought was that what if that earthquake was to strike a little late in the night, many people would continue to sleep through it and would not be able to take necessary precautionary action at least before an after-shock. This led to notification feature. Initially it was thought to be developed only as a safety alarm to be remotely triggered in case of a major disaster or an impending storm etc. But later we felt notifications can be used to engage citizens on a daily basis. Remote triggering of safety alarms is yet to be implemented though.

Secondly the recent urban floods in Chennai showed us that despite our conventional wisdom that connectivity is the first casualty in a disaster, mobile networks can be surprisingly resilient. It provided connectivity as long as towers had diesel to run and our phones had battery. But people were finding it slightly difficult to connect to the right authorities and share their locations, whereas if we had a system similar to this app, it could have been a simple click of a button. Our response would still be limited by our capacity, but I believe having that data of number of people trapped in various locations would have definitely helped us plan our response better.

We are also adding SMS based redundancy to the app, so that app is not completely dependent on internet connectivity. So if internet is available it will use internet or else the app will convey the message through SMS which will be received by the Server. It may be noted however that the app is currently in beta testing mode. More than 200 people are currently part of this testing and is expected to be launched in a month.

"The idea of the app was bounced back & forth a couple of times in our internal weekly meetings. But we were finding it difficult to find developers. Also we did not have any budget for this. I had learnt a little bit of android development during my days in Hnahthial and thought of trying it out myself. So started giving a couple of hours daily in the morning, and in around a month we had a working model. Showed it to some senior officers and they were really supportive. Now few very talented engineers from department of ICT are doing further improvement on the app and integration to State Data Servers. I had completely relied on Google services to develop it", Kannan adds.

"We are further adding a relief material management inventory system to the app so that people can place their requirements through the app itself. Often we provide what we feel they need than what they may actually need. This can slightly fill that gap. Such a system can also help in letting people who are interested in contributing know what kind of materials is actually required.Well, all this depends on existence of mobile connectivity though. If it's not there we will have to fall back to our existing methods."

TNT: To what extent do you think such apps would help take precautions against disasters?

Kannan: Firstly, we are planning a dedicated Do's & Don'ts section to the app as a ready reckoner for citizens. Secondly most of the disasters give us some time to react before it actually happens. Only exception may be earthquake. So a timely alert could be greatly helpful and accompanying advisories might actually help in minimizing the impact.

TNT: How do you plan to make this app accessible to rural areas still reeling under network problems?

Kannan: Currently it is completely based on internet. But SMS redundancy can be done very easily and is planned to be included in the final version. That should help us connect with the smart-phone population even if they are not connected to net. We are thinking of how to get this app pre-installed in all phones. Also we can have a portal (like the ones they have for fishermen) wherein citizens can register their phone numbers if they wish to get disaster related alerts through SMS. All local level disaster management committee members can be included automatically to this. This can help us cover non-smart phones too for provision of timely information.

However, Kannan points out a very important point in this regard, "The app is only a front-end. It is an enabling tool. The real work is to be done by the officers at DDMA and the zonal officers. I am actually scared there. If we do not respond to a disaster reported through the app, people will soon lose trust. It is dangerous to create a demand that cannot be catered to. Now we have made it very easy to report a disaster. But it is going to be a really tough task for us to respond to those in a reasonable time. App is in the digital world, but disaster & response in the real one. Thus this will be a success only if our Aizawl DDMA team does a really tremendous job in responding".

The link to the app can be found here MIZORAM DISASTER MANAGEMENT APP

By Shweta Raj Kanwar

shwetarajkanwar@gmail.com