Anupama Nair (www.mediaeyenews.com)
Even as images of endless burning pyres and funerals are flashed across the world accompanied by desperate social media messages, frantically seeking hospital beds everywhere in India and the world, Mumbai seems relatively calm. The second wave of the deadly corona virus has taken the world by storm. As far as Corona is concerned Mumbai and Maharashtra is in the right path to curb the spread deadly virus, and all hail the “Mumbai Model or BMC Model”, which started yielding positive results. All credit goes to BMC Commissioner Mr. Iqbal Singh Chahal. Amidst on-going corona crisis in the country, Mumbai is doing well.
“What exactly is the Mumbai model and can it be tried across the country”? Mr. Chahal says a ‘decentralized fight is the key’, even while he is clearly in control and works with a core team of dedicated people that is accessible and quick to respond. At a time when retired generals are asking for the army to fight the virus, it is interesting that Iqbal Chahal, a marathoner, and an engineer, who hails from a defense background, has worked through ‘war rooms’ to control the virus. Mr. Chahal was appointed when Mumbai was terribly battling the Phase I of the deadly virus, in May last year. Mumbai last year, was in the news for all wrong reasons, with terrifying videos of bodies wrapped in garbage bags, lying next to COVID patients in government hospital wards filled my eyes with tears.
Chahal worked on three strategies: eliminate the panic, de-centralize war rooms to cut response time and build adequate infrastructure. One of the primary reasons for panic was that COVID test results were directly shared by testing laboratories with patients, which created panic. What Mr. Chahal did was to abolish the central control room and ensure each of the COVID testing laboratories not to share test results directly with patients. They had to be shared with the BMC only.
In order to handle these test results shared with the BMC, he set up 24 war rooms, one in each civic ward and the war rooms would send test results of patients in their wards by 6am every day. Each war-room was a control center equipped with 30 telephone lines and, it had 10 telephone operators, 10 doctors with medical support staff and 10 ambulances. They worked round the clock .Interestingly, their work was further divided by creating 10 dashboards within each ward with information about availability of beds making a total of 240 de-centralized dashboards for the city of Mumbai. A proud but humble, Mr. Chahal stated “BMC followed an immense, data-driven method in which data material and action-plans were managed and coordinated through a scattered network of 24 ‘war rooms’, or ‘control centers’ as they were called, one for each of the city’s administrative districts. An online dashboard, was shown to citizens of Mumbai and was constantly updated by each ‘war room’ and each and every hospital, be it government run or private. It displayed the availability of beds and many other data. About 40% of Mumbai’s present capacity is in hospitals with ‘jumbo centers’
On May 7th I had written about Jumbo Center in Dadar Kohinoor building, and how it was well maintained. Very next day, a new Corona Vaccine Center has been inaugurated in Dharavi MG Road Municipal School Area. The inauguration was done by G North Ward Associate Analyst, Kiran Digavkar. Dharavi Police Officer Mrs. Gulab Patil was the special guest of honor. Councilors and many others were present to help and register and vaccinate the citizens who arrived there for their jab. Yesterday, vaccination was done amidst celebrating Mother’s Day
