COVID 19- Delhi
Mapping Emergency Public Relief Centers:
A Field Report from New Delhi
On 24th March at 2000 hours IST, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a countrywide lockdown to control the Coronavirus epidemic. As India’s already significant homeless and food insecure population has exploded over the past week, the government has faced one of its most difficult and important challenges to date. As central and state governments have sought to provide free food and humanitarian support, they have faced a number of challenges, including:
Unavailability of settlement level data in cities, where population density particularly in informal settlements is very high.
Unavailability of public infrastructure repository and shared access to information for different departments and researchers.
Immediately after the announcement of the India-wide lockdown, we started to work on releasing data and maps for the public good. Building upon our large dataset on public services with a focus on informal settlements we published our first map with #DelhiHungerReliefCentre on Twitter. This map had the locations of all the night shelters in Delhi along with the locations of ration shops where poor people could buy groceries at subsidized rates.
Our work in Delhi is inspired by the Cities of Delhi project and we have been working with the Centre for Policy Research and the Brown University to study unequal access to public services in Delhi, particularly in informal settlements. We have been on the field for the past few years, collecting data on public services with a focus on informal settlements. Through this process we have been able to build a large dataset of public services in Delhi.
The government of Delhi created a task force to work on hunger relief as many people had lost their jobs, shelter and thus access to food. We are part of this effort to support the large scale relief measures taken by the government. We worked with the government team to identify and locate 427 schools functioning as Hunger Relief Centres (HRC) in Delhi and created a map. This map is being updated regularly and shared through social media on Twitter, Whatsapp groups and through a dedicated site. The map was shared on Google’s My Maps platform, Open Street Map (OSM) and Map My India’s COVID response map.
The Delhi government hosted the Hunger Relief Centre map at corona.delhi.gov.in along with information on other relief measures taken by the government. The Chief Minister’s Office shared the HRC map, which was then covered in a number of news stories explaining the usage of maps in guiding people who did not have food. India Today(March 29), a national TV channel explained the map live for people to access the information. This map helped relief volunteers, social workers and government officials get access to reliable information on their mobile phones. The site was used by citizens to access information on relief centers set up by the Delhi government. As of 4th April 2020 the site had more than 300,000 views on the HRC map.
During the initial two days of the lockdown, 231 night shelters run by the government for homeless people were also serving as Hunger Relief Centers. The shelters, particularly those near inter-state bus terminus and railway stations, were quickly overcrowded with an influx of people seeking shelter. Some of the homeless people were also shifting from more peripheral areas of the city towards the center for safety as the area around Old Delhi has been a safe space for homeless people. To maintain social distancing, it was necessary to decongest the night shelters in that area and we used the school database to help the government team in locating nearest schools by walking distance from such overcrowded night shelters. The Delhi government decided to set up new Hunger Relief Centers in the nearby schools.
The Delhi government had also started a hunger helpline in each of its 11 administrative districts, to address increasing demand for food and rations. An internal map was made by the hunger relief team for use by the officers and volunteers which had one layer of active hunger relief centers and another layer of public facilities as a backup. In consultation with the Delhi Disaster Management Authority a protocol was designed to use the maps for helping people find access to relief centers. The helpline operators were trained to use the map to quickly search for the area from which they were getting requests for food, so that they could locate the nearest Hunger Relief Center and find directions to it. If a Hunger Relief Center was not available nearby, they would identify a potential Hunger Relief Center from the backup layer and flag it to their managers for approval. Throughout this process managed by the hunger relief team 650 Hunger Relief Centers were identified and mapped and the list continues to expand daily.
Senior officers of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority used these maps to plan and monitor the logistical operations of food distribution. Field officers, while on field duty used the HRC maps to locate and navigate to the Hunger Relief Centers in their districts. Journalists and other NGOs were also using the maps to guide homeless and hungry people to the nearest Hunger Relief Centers.
The Urban Spatial Observatory project shared some of its resources publicly in clear and accessible formats including simple dynamic maps, spreadsheets, .pdf files and text messages embedded with geo-coordinates to enable cross-platform accessibility. Throughout this lockdown period we plan to continue to work with state and civil society efforts in the fight against COVID-19 in Delhi and other cities around the country.
Please write to us if you would like to collaborate.
Covered in media:
Some senior journalists of Indian media, including prestigious Ramon Magsaysay award winning Ravish Kumar of the NDTV, Suhasini Haider of The Hindu, Madhu Trehan and many others publicly shared our map on different social media platforms as a handy tool.
* Our team lead in Delhi worked with the Govt. of Delhi's COVID relief team.