Information Diffusion for Real Time Resource Planning During Crisis Leveraging Emerging Digital Technologies

Ravi, Swarnalakshmi; Kamalanabhan, T. J.; Jawahar, Thanga

Every day in some corner of this world displacements are happening due to adverse impact of climate change or natural disasters or riots or epidemics and global pandemics. Such displacements could be either internal displacement or cross border displacement. In just last year (2019), nearly 24.9 million people have been displaced due to the above cited reasons as per the report of United Nations Refugee Agency. Warsaw International Mechanism has put forth its effort to address the concern of displacements and support humanity along with United Nations, States, few ad-hoc working groups, civil societies and few supporting countries way back in 2016. On one side while the combined and sincere efforts are being made, on the other side the threats in terms of violence, riots, natural disasters, pandemics keep increasing at an alarming rate. Recent Covid-19 is a classic example which are likely to trigger more displacements to be continued in 2020. This has a spillover effect on demand and supply chain of health care services to the impacted as well as the citizens or locals in a particular region. Our paper aims to bring the combined efficiencies of emerging digital technologies and available data in order to gain insights and use them efficiently at the time of global crisis without causing interruption to health care and humanitarian services to all needy people.