A citizen-led emergency response platform built in the middle of India’s darkest pandemic weeks — because when hospitals were full and information was failing, five hundred volunteers decided that was not good enough.
Snapshot
- COVID-19 emergency response initiative, founded by Yashraj Akashi of TEDxGateway
- Volunteer-led movement spanning 150+ cities across India
- 500+ volunteers mobilised nationally, working in shifts around the clock
- 114,000+ requests for help supported
- 1,500+ hospital bed bookings facilitated
- 3,000+ ambulance bookings coordinated
- 100+ ecosystem partners including AWS, WhatsApp, Government of Maharashtra, Invest India
- 200,000+ lives impacted
- Strategy & Technology support provided through Apexon Ignite, led alongside Harish Nair
IndiaShield
In late April 2021, India had its second COVID crisis. The Delta variant was moving through the country at a velocity nobody had planned for. Hospitals were full. Oxygen was rationed. ICU beds were being allocated by phone calls between strangers on Twitter. Crematoriums in four cities were running for twenty-four hours a day and could not keep up. The official daily case count was crossing three hundred thousand; the true count, as everyone in the country could see, was much higher.
It was in those weeks that the partnership we are about to describe began.
IndiaShield
IndiaShield had been conceived earlier in the pandemic by a small group of volunteers led by Yashraj Akashi — founder of TEDxGateway, India’s largest and oldest ideas festival. He had assembled, almost from nothing, a team of over five hundred volunteers across one hundred and fifty Indian cities, working under one operating principle: fix the information gap so that people who need medical help can find it in time.
Volunteers manned phones and chat windows in shifts. They verified — and re-verified, every hour, because the data decayed in hours — which hospitals had ICU beds, ventilators, oxygen. They coordinated ambulance dispatches. They tracked vaccines. They debunked the misinformation that circulated on WhatsApp faster than the truth could keep up. They were the human layer between the bureaucratic system that had collapsed and the people who were dying because of the collapse.
By mid-2021, the phone-and-spreadsheet system that had carried them through the first year of the pandemic was buckling. Volunteers were dropping out from exhaustion. Information that took an hour to verify was already stale by the time it reached the patient who needed it.
What IndiaShield needed, by April 2021, was technology.
How Ignite came in
The introduction came through Manish Dureja — then CEO of InterMiles, the loyalty business that had grown out of Jet Privileges, Jet Airways’s rewards programme — and his team including Ketan Phanse. Manish had been working with the IndiaShield volunteers from early in the second wave. He understood, before most corporate leaders did, what citizen-led platforms could do that institutional players could not. His own moral position on the moment, quoted later in the public announcement of the partnership, was the simplest sentence anyone said in those weeks: “How could one sleep when the nation was in turmoil?”
He brought us in. The introduction took one phone call. Within a single day, the engagement had begun. Within a weekend, a working solution was delivered.
Harish Nair, my Ignite colleague, took the lead on coordination with IndiaShield’s volunteer leadership. He spent his weekends and many weeknights on the project across the worst months of 2021. Many other Igniters and Infoneers joined him — engineers, project managers, designers who made the platform indispensable for people who were calling in panic.
What we built was, in technical terms, modest. A web and mobile platform connecting three layers — people seeking help, volunteers offering verification and routing, and partner organisations holding the actual medical resources. A real-time database of hospital beds, ambulances, vaccination centres, oxygen suppliers. A WhatsApp integration, because WhatsApp was where the country actually lived. A communications backbone that did not collapse under load.
Ignite’s role, Rutesh Shah put plainly in the public announcement: we knew we had to help, and what we could provide was a data and communications infrastructure that would remain stable and would support them for the duration of the crisis.
We were not the heroes. The volunteers were. We were the people who made sure the volunteers’ platform did not crash.
What it added up to
By August 2021, IndiaShield had supported 114,000 requests for help, facilitated 1,500 hospital bed bookings and 3,000+ ambulance dispatches, and worked alongside 100+ partner organisations across 150 Indian cities.
The list of those partners is, in a way, the most important paragraph on this page. In the spring and summer of 2021, when most institutions were paralysed by the scale of the crisis, these were the ones who showed up: AWS, WhatsApp, InterMiles, World Wide Technology, BMC, Parentune, FlexiLoan, Invest India, the Government of Maharashtra, GOQii, Yulu, Manah Health, MedsForMore, Gateway Platforms, Zoho, MakeMyTrip, Concentrix, Haptik, TEDxGateway — and dozens more.
I do not use the word superhero lightly. But the associated organisations during those months — the founders who slept four hours a night for two months running, the engineers who shipped at midnight, the volunteers who took emergency calls between their own family bereavements, the loyalty-programme team that pivoted overnight from points-and-rewards to oxygen-and-ambulances — were superheroes.
The platform supported over two hundred thousand lives.
For many, help did not arrive in time. The Delta wave killed people the platform could not save. That is also part of the honest record.
What I learned
A crisis is not an opportunity for institutions to look heroic. It is an opportunity to be quietly useful. The right way to think about corporate philanthropy in a crisis is show up early, do the boring work, take credit late.
Volunteers, properly supported, are the most scalable response to any crisis. IndiaShield reached 150 cities not because it had funding but because it had five hundred people who did not need to be paid. Technology should follow people, not the other way around.
My role
I led the IndiaShield engagement from Apexon’s Ignite philanthropic platform, from April 2020 through December 2022. Together with Harish Nair and a wider Ignite team, we built and maintained the software platform that supported IndiaShield across the worst two years of the pandemic.
The introduction belongs to Manish Dureja and the InterMiles / Jet Privileges team. The credit for IndiaShield belongs to Yashraj Akashi and the five-hundred-plus volunteers across one hundred and fifty cities. The wider partner ecosystem — AWS, WhatsApp, the Government of Maharashtra, Invest India, and the dozens of others — quietly underwrote different parts of the platform. We were the rails they ran on.
Looking Back
There are projects that create growth.
There are projects that create opportunity.
And then there are projects where the only metric that matters is whether someone gets home safely.
IndiaShield belonged to the third category.
During the pandemic, every request represented a real family facing fear, uncertainty and urgency. The experience reinforced a simple belief: technology is at its most meaningful when it serves humanity.
The volunteers, healthcare workers, partners and citizens behind IndiaShield demonstrated what is possible when people come together around a shared purpose.
The pandemic tested all of us.
IndiaShield reminded us of the extraordinary capacity of ordinary people to help one another.