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Political ideologies aside, MPs, experts come together to fight Covid-19

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | ByDeeksha Bhardwaj
Apr 06, 2020 11:51 PM IST

The group has invited suggestions from the public on its website starting Tuesday and will meet once a week from April 15.

A device as rudimentary as a thermometer got Samajwadi Party (SP) spokesperson Ghanshyam Tiwari thinking about a group, which could come up with innovative solutions to prevent the spread of coronavirus disease (Covid-19) outbreak.

“Our thermometers are primarily contact heavy,” Tiwari told Hindustan Times. “We need contact-less thermal sensors that can collate data, as Covid-19 spreads through contact. This can come in handy for frontline workers combating the pandemic. We can put out the data online and create a thermal map,” he said.

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Tiwari has set the ball rolling to create a national Covid-19 action group with people cutting across party lines such as members of Parliament (MP), public policy organisations and health experts. The group is named Parliamentarians with Innovators for India, whose primary task is to ensure that the solutions reach the masses.

“The vision is to bring together think-tanks, policy experts with parliamentarians to conceptualise innovative solutions in the fight against Covid-19,” Anil Antony, south and west states coordinator for the initiative said. “The focus is technological solutions such as low-cost medical solutions like ventilators and testing kits. We have even reached out to some premier venture capitalists in case funding is needed for any of these projects.”

An alumnus of Harvard University, Tiwari believes that the MPs have the last-mile connectivity with people on the ground and are best suited to spread public awareness about Covid-19.

He started the initiative by reaching out to Shiv Sena’s Rajya Sabha MP Priyanka Chaturvedi. “The idea is to put together a group of people from different political ideologies and rise above our political differences to fight this pandemic together,” Chaturvedi said.

The fledgling group consists of 14 MPs including National People’s Party’s (NPP) Agatha Sangma, GVL Narsimha Rao, Jamyang Tshering Namgyal, Varun Gandhi and Sudhanshu Trivedi from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s Kalanidhi Veerasamy, Karti Chidambaram, Manish Tewari and Rajeev Gowda from the Congress, Bahujan Samaj Party’s Kunwar Danish Ali, YSR Congress Party’s Lavu Krishna, Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra and Biju Janata Dal’s Sujeet Kumar.

The group has also tied up with the Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Indore, Confederation of Indian Industry, Delhi, and the Population Foundation of India.

Health experts such as Meenakshi Datta Ghosh, former special secretary, Union Ministry of Health & Family Welfare; Dr Arnab Mukherjee of IIM-Bangalore and Dr. Amir Ullah Khan, advisor, Indian School of Business (ISB), are a part of the novel initiative.

The group has invited suggestions from the public on its website starting Tuesday and will meet once a week from April 15.

“We’ll need protocols and suggestions as to how to tackle many other possible problems such as traveling in public transport after the ongoing 21-day nationwide lockdown is lifted,” Tiwari said. “We need to start thinking about the next step right now,” he added.

The group is also planning to collate videos in several languages to offer healthcare professionals tutorials on the pandemic. “Not everyone knows all the protocols. The government can’t do everything, so we’re trying to do our bit. The solutions will be posted on LinkedIn, a social media network for professionals, as we need to synthesise expertise for public welfare,” he added.

“This will be a knowledge-sharing platform that has a wide scope,” said Congress MP Rajeev Gowda.

“The exchange of information will help cross-fertilisation of ideas to fight Covid-19,” he added.

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