Partnering with the Central Government to Help Cities through the COVID-19 Pandemic

Vision: In recent times, COVID-19 has been the most significant life-threatening pandemic that the world has experienced. Google’s vision was to assist the country fight the spread of COVID-19, by organizing all the relevant geospatial information and making it easily accessible and useful for everyone.

Objectives

Google’s primary goal was to assist government authorities with COVID-19 response efforts by disseminating authoritative and trusted information to citizens across the country. Over the last two years, it has achieved this by staying in lockstep with each government initiative, providing timely and accurate information to users, thereby helping India fight and recover from COVID-19. The three notable areas of partnership arey Food & Night Shelters- Providing the latest information on food & night shelters to migrant workers adversely affected by the lockdowns. y Testing Centres- Helping users find authorized COVID-19 testing centres near them. y Vaccination Centres- Providing information around closest vaccination centres, with details such as appointment availability, type of vaccine, and direct link to the COWIN website to enable easy registrations.

Stakeholders Involved

Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Indian Council of Medical Research, MyGov, State Governments and Citizens of India. Solution and Implementation

From the onset of COVID-19, Google has continuously worked with the Indian government to help India through each stage of the pandemic.

y Food & Night Shelters: As India went into a sudden lockdown to fight the spread of COVID-19, a humanitarian crisis emerged wherein millions of migrant workers could no longer afford to feed themselves or have a place to stay. So, the Indian government, working with NGOs, started setting up centres to distribute free food & provide shelter at night. However, the key challenge was how to get this information to the people who need these shelters. So, the Ministry of Information Technology reached out to Google. While the team was humbled by the opportunity, they realized that there were several challenges to solve for:

Æ Ensuring widespread data coverage across the country in a consistent format with accurate attributes

Æ Ensuring the product feature works on all types of phones as most of the users may not possess smartphones, and

Æ Spreading awareness quickly to the target audience, i.e., migrant workers.

Google swiftly created a cross-functional cross-regional SWAT team that took a four-pronged approach to the problem:

Æ Sourcing authoritative reliable information- Partnered with MyGov, Ministry of Information Technology and state governments to seamlessly source data on the location of food & night shelters soon as they were set up. Æ Creating a robust data ingestion pipeline- Verified the information on food & night shelters and ingested them as temporary listings. Æ Updating Product to display information- Updated the algorithm and product UI to surface this information for a wide range of queries across multiple product surfaces. Within a week, the feature was launched in multiple Indian languages across three Google products (Google Search, Google Maps and

Google Assistant). Æ Driving Awareness- Leveraged multiple media channels to ensure quick information dissemination to the target audience (200+ press articles, spots on TV/Radio, social channels, Google Homepage Link,

SMS blasts to 200M+ users)