At 8.53 p.m. on August 15, Darez Ahmed, State Mission Director, National Health Mission, Tamil Nadu, created a WhatsApp group, ‘Kerala Floods,’ which would soon turn out to be the State’s lifeline as it went through an unprecedented calamity in its recent history.
The young IAS officer, himself a doctor and a native of Manjeri, Malappuram, was responding to a distress message from the Kottayam government medical college, which had run direly short of medical oxygen. Flood waters had inundated inter-State routes used by trucks ferrying medical supplies into Kerala.
Mr. Ahmed and his team mobilised oxygen from Tirunelveli, Salem and Kanyakumari districts, which helped doctors in Thrissur, Kottayam and Alappuzha medical colleges sustain critically ill patients.
“From our experience of the December 2015 floods in Chennai, we knew that Kerala would face a crisis of a larger magnitude as almost the entire State was affected. I got together a WhatsApp group involving my senior colleagues and all District Collectors and subcollectors of Tamil Nadu to respond to distress calls from Kerala. We had the total backing of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister. He asked us to extend all support to Kerala,” Dr. Ahmed told The Hindu.
The group grew bigger as all first-line officials in Kerala handling logistics, senior Health officials and those from other departments linked up. Messages were going back and forth every minute. As soon as a request was placed, someone was on it, meeting the requirement.
In the first six days itself, some 700 truckloads of relief materials were despatched to Kerala from Tamil Nadu.
The WhatsApp group soon became the gateway for relief materials from other States too. Officials coordinating relief in Maharashtra, Odisha, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Railway officials, and Keralite civil servants from the rest of India joined the group because it was easier to respond to requirements immediately this way. “The support rendered by Tamil Nadu was total. The Tamil Nadu Collectors immediately provided whatever we asked for. When Wayanad desperately needed blankets, it was the Ootty Collector who responded. Tamil Nadu Director of Public Health K. Kolandaswamy sent us his team of epidemiologists, who has been working closely with our own Health Department, setting up a health control room, devising post-disaster health advisories and managing everything from GIS mapping of diseases to epidemiological surveillance,” said Rajeev Sadanandan, Additional Chief Secretary, Health, Kerala.
A model to emulate
Mr. Sadanandan said the WhatsApp group-centric operation was mammoth and its pace, frenetic. The enthusiasm shown by group members, mostly youngsters, was infectious. None of them slept for days.
They set up a smooth mechanism for the 1,500-odd trucks of relief materials that came from all over India. The WhatsApp group and its workflow management is a study in itself and has emerged as a model for administrations fighting natural disasters anywhere in the country.