Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs Chinmaya IAS Academy – Current Affairs
Related Articles
- The Indian Institute of Technology Madras developed a crowdsourcing initiative to collect real time information on areas affected by waterlogging or flooding during the 2021 northeast monsoon. The website has been opened again this year with a few changes.
- Previously, responders uploaded pictures of the area but now they can mark water levels relative to a person or vehicles such as car, bike or bicycle. As the pointer moves, the level of water in centimetres is calculated.
- This ensures that people do not have to physically measure the levels. The website now includes Tamil as a language as well. The research team has enabled updates to be shared on WhatsApp.
- “This allows us to collect information from as many locations as possible which overcomes the inefficiency of physically going to locations and measuring water levels,” said Balaji Narasimhan, professor, Department of Civil Engineering, IIT-M, who leads the team working on this website.
- He stresses the importance of public participation in proactively reporting situations of waterlogging and says that without them, this initiative cannot reach its potential.
- According to him, currently there is only theoretical information on how water sheds respond to rainfall but this initiative can take it forward with data which can reflect man-made interferences also.
- The key, he says, is to provide data as often as possible, even as frequently as every hour, because it improves understanding of an area’s response to rain.
- The website has received 18,000 requests in the past 24 hours which means that many people have accessed the website to check or give information.
- A map feature on the righthand corner of the website is available for the public to check on which areas are inundated and flooded and is updated every 24 hours which ensures that the most relevant and current information is available, including on the database.
- “We have been working on this project for the past year but the initial website took two to three months,” said a student from the Centre for Innovation, the student-run innovation lab of IIT-M that is working on this project.
SOURCE: THE HINDU, THE ECONOMIC TIMES, PIB
