After a successful pilot in Tamil Nadu, the government has started a pan-India telesurvey to reach out to people without smartphones to conduct a Covid-related search. Calls will be placed from the phone number ‘1921’ asking people questions about symptoms of the disease.
The telesurvey, announced late Tuesday, will be carried out by the National Informatics Centre (NIC), and is intended to aid the government detect the hotspots of coronavirus. An interactive voice response system (IVRS), backended by an NIC team, will be rolled out.The analysis of call data will be done by other appropriate wings of the government, said officials.
A senior official of the IT ministry said that the telesurvey shall reach out to 850 million feature phone users across the country. Officials said that of the 1.2 billion mobile phone users in India, only 35 million have feature phones. “Just as the Aarogya Setu is reaching out to smart phone users, the tele-survey will collect details from feature phone users,” the official said.
The call leads to successive prompts for SMSes on the user’s feature phones, asking for answers to a set menu of questions. The systems are being readied and will be rolled out by the weekend, officials said. The service will be vernacular, and will be available in languages like Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Hindi, etc.
The telesurvey was initially piloted in Tamil Nadu a fortnight ago with the help of Indian Institute of Technology Madras, simultaneously when the IT ministry was rolling out the Aarogya Setu. Another ministry official, on condition of anonymity, told HT that the pilot was successful and helped authorities find the next area of spread. “It helped us find the next red zone or containment zone,” said the official.
During the pilot, 15,000 people were screened through the telesurvey, which helped authorities finalise a list of suspected Covid-19 patients. “State authorities would then reach out to them for necessary action,” said the official.
The number ‘1921’ was selected as the ‘1922’ number is a toll-free service for people to listen to the prime minister’s popular radio programme, Mann ki Baat, the first official quoted above said.
In a release, the government said that the calls placed to mobile phones, will “enable proper feedback of the prevalence and distribution of Covid symptoms”. “Please be aware of any other calls by pranksters or or calls from any other number in the guise of such similar survey,” the release said.
