NEW DELHI : Just a day after India imposed the largest quarantine exercise in human history on 25 March, Subhash Patil, a partner at PwC India, received an SOS phone call that can be summarized into a simple question: Is there a way to quickly amp up capabilities within municipal corporations to fight covid-19?
Bengaluru was a prime target to experiment with, because it was setting up a so-called technology-enabled “war room". Initially it had a few maps on the screen, Patil said. “We wanted real-time data on the screens because the broad sense (even at that early stage) was ‘this is not going to be over in a month’." Within days, the city’s information technology ecosystem came alive, and engineers from Infosys and Microsoft were roped