SNAPSHOT

China was able to lockdown several of its major cities and densely populated provinces more effectively than any other country has been able to in dealing with Covid-19.

The two main reasons China was able to accomplish this are -

1. a grid like organization system for its cities and,

2. a network of grid workers to organize neighborhood level logistics

We are building Minchu - a grid level mobilization platform for cities and volunteer networks to rapidly organize action to deal with a pandemic.

Minchu means lightning in Kannada, a prominent Indian language.

We want to create a public-private partnership between volunteers, public governance bodies and tech companies to utilize Minchu to flatten the curve and halt the spread of Covid-19 in Bangalore.

If Minchu shows significant results within one week in Bangalore, it can be scaled to most big cities.

The Chinese Government created a project - The China National Grid project - to organize the whole country in grids at the smallest level. This Grid system was used very effectively in dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Chinese Grid Structure

Source: South China Morning Post

There are 13,000 grids and 8,700 grid workers in Wuhan, with each worker managing 300 to 500 households. During the outbreak, many volunteers joined to help them buy food, medicine and other essential items.

Source: Xinhua, South China Morning Post

Size and Demographics

Source: Wikipedia

There are some important similarities in size and demographics between Wuhan and Bangalore as shown above. This should help us estimate the number of grid workers necessary to emulate the kind of action seen in Wuhan during the outbreak.

Grid workers collected health data from households, such as the body temperature of residents, sometimes through WeChat groups. They also delivered food and other essential services, thereby eliminating the need for residents to leave their home. Grid workers and chat groups played a very important rule in the successful lockdown in Chinese cities like Wuhan.

In order to make India’s Janata curfew lockdown successful and flatten the curve of the pandemic, two important things must be accomplished at a micro level.

1. Temperature screening and isolation of those who show symptoms

2. Last mile delivery of essential services without citizens leaving their homes

We can accomplish this by using a grid worker model like Wuhan, powered with a multiplatform chat tunneling technology as described below.

MINCHU WORKERS

Minchu workers will be a team of community volunteers who will perform functions similar to the Grid workers in China.

Minchu workers will deliver essential items like groceries and medicines to elderly, sick, pregnant women and other needy families. Minchu workers will come from several sources -

1. Private citizens recruited through a social media outreach program

2. College students

3. Volunteer and Paramilitary organizations

4. Workers from political parties

TECHNOLOGY

We have built a multi platform chat tunneling system that enables residents of a grid to chat with Minchu workers and send them requests for essential services. Users can use Telegram and FB Messenger to chat.

The chats are tunneled to the Minchu workers who are responsible for that grid. Any Minchu worker who is available can chat with the user and to the user it will appear like the response came from the same Minchu source.

Minchu workers see conversations with different residents organized in channels. Each resident is a separate channel and all the data from a channel can be used to provide essential services, identify the spread of the virus in the community and figure out which families to isolate.

The Minchu worker can co-ordinate delivery, taking temperature, collecting data and other tasks with the residents of the grid directly.

USES OF THE PLATFORM