Smart governance in pandemic management

Abstract

The Covid-19 outbreak in India exhausted the infrastructure in the urban areas, points out the lack of disaster preparedness in the Indian cities and proves the ineffective service delivery mechanism of the existing governance framework. To ensure effective responses, the collaborative knowledge of every concerned sector is needed. Hence, the topic of Smart Governance came into the existence to ensure effective governance through the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a tool. Smart Governance in a practical approach that addresses technological support in the organizational, internal and external bureaucratic processes. By harnessing and analyzing data from Urban Big data, satellite imagery, sensor networks, etc. the smart governance for the crisis can be ensured. Pandemic Management in the recent context is a crucial topic because of the ongoing outbreak and also to sustain the future pandemic resilience of the city. So if we look into the details of pandemic management, it has four components such as 1) Disease Spread and Resource management, 2) Awareness to control the Spread, 3) Preparedness and Real-Time Responses and 4) Communication and Engagement. The effective functioning and management of these components are the main challenges of urban governance. The clarity in the knowledge of the Disaster spread is crucial in managing the resources and prioritizing based on the extent of the disaster. Thus the data analysis can help predict the trend and thus locate the future spread and preparedness according to it. The thrust sector in the management of the Pandemic is ‘Health and Sanitation’, which has several components of management such as Infection Control, Skilled Manpower, Resource management and Training for special criteria. The city’s healthcare infrastructure rendered to be insufficient in these hard times, so the effective governance and management of the infrastructure are essential to fight back. The sharing of the knowledge is also essential to induce civil participation in decision making to align the welfare mechanism with the ground realities as the real-time responses of the crisis hold a greater value in a Pandemic Scenario. The Sagar City is in the Sagar district, the Central region of the state of Madhya Pradesh. The city is recognized as one of the 100 smart cities of India. The take on the management of the Pandemic crisis in the city was to provide health facilities to all of the citizens. Smart governance is deployed for the provision in terms of resource management, transparency and clarity in the services. The Sagar Smart City had formulated a mechanism through the use of existing infrastructure installed under the Smart City Mission. With the use of ICT tech innovations and with the help of Sagar Nagar Nigam and several Citizen based agencies collaborative Covid-19 Pandemic management has been observed. The focus of the study is to assess the current mechanism employed in the pandemic management using the infrastructure in hand, the past efforts and best practices as well as to understand and locate the gaps in the governance part and how these can be helped with the smart intervention. The methods of the usage of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the management of the pandemic are to be assessed and the gap identification of this as well. The study also aims to look into the healthcare infrastructure of the city and assess and understand the pandemic resilience factor for the future. Thus the gap identification can help achieve a systematic Smart Governance for the city of Sagar. Smart governance in India is a new concept for better service delivery in urban areas. So the assessment of the Smart governance system is necessary for the improvement of the infrastructure and a better framework. According to the National e-governance Service Delivery Assessment (NeSDA), the indicators which are essential to the assessment of the e-governance are i) Ease of use, ii) End service Delivery, iii) Content availability, iv) Integrated service delivery and v) Request tracking. These indicators ensure all the verticals of the smart governance scenario for Effective Service Delivery. Through the aforementioned assessment, both the verticals of the study ‘Smart Governance’ and Pandemic Management are to be assessed. The identification of the gap in the existing infrastructure through these assessments will lead to the recommendation and way forward. The outcome of the study will direct, how the existing infrastructure in an urban area can be converted into Pandemic Smart Infrastructure through an efficient governance framework.