Concerted Research, Development and Innovation have enabled telecom and Internet reach most of the 1.3 billion people in India at a price-point that they can afford. This telecom network is being used for a whole lot of application today providing a large variety of services like education, health care, financial inclusion and disaster management. In almost all crisis situation like that created by coronavirus, one finds that telecom network can be leveraged to offer help to the needy, administration and coordinators to better manage the disaster. Aarogya Setu for smartphones and Aarogya Setu for feature phones are two such efforts, which are potentially going to help in this difficult situation.

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IntroductionTuberculosis (TB) is a notifiable disease and health care providers are required to notify every TB case to local authorities. We conducted a pilot study to determine the usefulness and feasibility of mobile interface in TB notification (MITUN) voice based system for notification of TB cases by private medical practitioners.MethodologyThe study was conducted during September 2013 to October 2014 in three zones of Chennai, an urban setting in South India. Private clinics wherein services are provided by single private medical practitioners were approached. The steps involved in MITUN included: Registration of the practitioners and notification of TB cases by them through voice interactions. Pre and post-intervention questionnaires were administered to collect information on TB notification practices and feasibility of MITUN after an implementation period of 6 months.ResultsA total of 266 private medical practitioners were approached for the study. Of them, 184 (69%) participated in the study; of whom 11 (6%) practitioners used MITUN for TB notification. Reasons for not using MITUN include lack of time, referral of patients to government facility, issues related to patient confidentiality and technical problems. Suggestions for making mobile phone based TB notification process user-friendly included reducing call duration, including only crucial questions and using missed call or SMS options.ConclusionThe performance (feasibility and usefulness) of MITUN voice based system for TB notification in the present format was sub-optimal. Perceived problems, logistical and practical issues preclude scale–up of notification of TB by private practitioners.

In this paper, we identify the topological and routing technique constraints on the performance of optical backbone WDM networks with wavelength conversion at the nodes and propose techniques to overcome this constraints so that the network performance is enhanced. For any session request, a lightpath has to be established on the shortest path between the node pairs. As each lightpath is a substantial revenue and long-lived, the network operator would like no lightpath request rejection (call blocking) or would like to accomodate more calls in the network before he has to upgrade his network. Hence given a network, we are proposing an analytical method to identify the critical links of the network which will cause early blocking, for the fixed shortest path routing. Once the critical links are identified, we would like to analyse the physical location of these critical links on the network topology and propose a new fixed routing technique namely, restricted routing by which the performance is enhanced as it balances the load uniformly among the links. In this routing technique, not all the calls have the shortest path. We compare the performance of the restricted routing with the optimal performance where all the links have equal blocking probability. The analysis is carried out on some of the standard backbone networks and the results show that by the restricted routing there is a significant performance improvement.

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