Thiruvananthapuram: Jasmine Revolution, Arab Spring and Kerala floods. What's the connection? Political change in Tunisia and Egypt some eight years ago was not triggered by the barrel of a gun but through social media.
Oceans away, something similar happened in God's Own Country moments after the August deluge hit the state. When the biblical Trinity stood silent watching the catastrophe unfolding in Kerala, an Army of youngsters, who grew up with instant messaging, online video games and Wikipedia, rose like superheroes armed with a glowing flat rectangular slab not larger than one's palm and the 'virtual' Trinity of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.
The floods in Kerala rose faster than the speed of thought. Many ran out taking nothing but their lives with them. Others found themselves marooned with no way of escape. Schools, halls, auditoriums, hostels and even homes were converted into relief centres, and control rooms were set up on a war footing in all districts.
It was not a village or a town or even a district that was being run down by the marauding waters but eight densely populated districts. The panic was so killing that desperate calls from the sinking, and their loved ones in almost every corner of the world, clogged the communication lines. The official network crashed right on day one, August 16.
At this moment, when it looked like the end was near, the GenNext superheroes started 'texting', 'hashtagging,' 'tweeting,' 'data mining,' 'sharing' and crowd-sourcing help. The world was their control room. Volunteers unknown to each other coordinated things sitting in places as wide apart as Palakkad and California. “Everyone was putting out all manner of information — distress calls, warnings, alerts — on social media. Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter were the preferred platforms. There was no leader, no law. It might have looked like anarchy but it worked,” said VK Adarsh, a banker and IT expert.
“A colleague of mine who was in a rescue camp with her child gave a frantic call on August 17 saying that their camp was flooding up fast. I tweeted the message with her phone number and location coordinates. After two hours, I was told that they were shifted. I have no clear idea how, but they were saved. Perhaps my tweet was re-tweeted many times over, seen on popular Kerala Flood hashtags, further forwarded and shared, and eventually picked up by the rescue team on the ground,” Adarsh said.
Virtual control room
While individuals kept shooting in the dark, hoping that luck will do its bit, there were those, like IAS officer N Prasanth, who used their social media standing to cobble up a system for the smooth flow of information. Prasanth, who is now a deputy secretary in New Delhi, quickly set up a virtual control room with his core team members seated in the UK, the US and Chennai. “Given the conditions, even the phones of collectors were not functioning. So, we had to find a way around the problem and keep the information flow going,” Prasanth said.
There were power outages in many parts of the state and his core team members were outside the state precisely for this reason. “Even my technology head, Lebi, worked from the US,” Prasanth said. He also had 6,000 volunteers sorting and prioritising information and filling up Google spreadsheets. “We got them all united through the Facebook page Kerala Flood 2018,” he said. “Many FB pages and groups joined us later,” he said.
Market logic and Navy wives
This set in motion a sort of smart market logic. Individual FB and WhatsApp users started to tag their verified distress messages and other relevant posts on popular FB pages like Kerala Flood 2018 to get maximum spread. The result was, information gradually got centralised on a handful of FB pages making rescue coordination easier. And if such popular FB pages are managed by bureaucrats like Prasanth, things become a bit more smoother. They have a closer rapport with the state rescue mission and therefore can link those in distress and the rescue team more efficiently.
Prasanth, in fact, closely coordinated with the FB group of Navy wives. “This made things even easier,” he said. He had also used his FB pull to rope in volunteers to work at the district control rooms. There were popular citizen websites, too, like that of Deepa Nishanth and Sreechithiran J. Both had mobilised volunteers and kept giving them timely instructions, even admonishing them, on their FB pages.
Volunteer revolution
These volunteers, most of them young engineers and even school kids, picked up all WhatsApp distress messages, and verified their authenticity. The only way to validate is to call up the number, which could either be that of the person in distress or that of the informer.
“If found genuine, and most of them were, we ask them for the location. They should also tell us a landmark because the mere name of the village or town will throw open the search to a wider area. This we pass on to the district authorities who then pass it on to the rescue team that is nearest to the location,” said Anup Vijayan, a young electrical engineer who volunteered at the Kottayam Collectorate.
There were instances when the marooned, especially those who had left their houses, had no idea where they were. “In such cases we ask them to name a structure nearby, a temple or a church or even a community centre. Once we get the name we will locate it on Google map and pass the information to the rescue team,” Anup said.
But by the second day, the mobile devices of most of those marooned had lost their charges and the informers, most of whom were friends or relatives in Gulf or Europe or America, will only have a vague idea of the location. “Then it becomes difficult to spot the exact point but in certain cases we had called up the cell companies and pulled out the last call details of the informer's mobile to zero in on the location,” Anup said.
The same activity was carried out from outside the state, too. Bhumika Trust, for instance, had put up Malayalam-speaking volunteers in their Chennai control room to sort and prioritise information. “We had three units. The first unit took calls on helplines, and the second verified social media messages. They do the validation, collect relevant information and pass them on to the rescue group. The third team did the follow up to make sure whether the rescue had actually been carried out,” said Bhumika Trust advisory board member Latha Subramaniam, who was also part of the Gujarat and Chennai floods rescue missions.
People trapped inside buildings sent out live videos to keep the world updated of their plight and to seek help. Volunteers who led rescue missions went live on Facebook and Twitter to keep flood-victims and their relatives posted of the progress of rescue operations.
Relief camp coordinators posted live videos to commandeer more volunteers, relief material and manage resource movement.
Celebrities like Mohanlal, Tovino, Indrajith Sukumaran, Parvathy, Poornima and others posted FB lives to attract more people to rescue and relief missions.
Later, those in relief camps also posted live videos of their activities, study classes, and interactions there. The mobile and social media traffic spike during the floods has not yet been ascertained.
Death is no laughing matter
The floods seemed to have washed away social media's notorious flippancy. It was as if the tools, FB and Twitter and WhatsApp, were developed solely for life-saving purposes. When the volunteers in flood-affected areas started losing their mobile charges, Prasanth issued a call through the Kerala Flood 2018 page for power banks. “Soon enough, 30-40 mobile power banks reached each of the control rooms in district collectorates,” Prasanth said.
Then again, the International Chalu Union (ICU), popular for its scathing tongue-in-cheek trolls, stopped joking. “We stopped posting trolls and memes after the floods,” said Hrishikesh Bhaskaran, the admin of ICU. “We thought we will use our reach to spread official information. The FB page of the State Disaster Management Authority at that time had 40,000 likes. But our likes had touched one million,” he said.
This re-arrangement of priorities had happened during the Arab Spring in 2011, too. An Arab Social Media Report stated that in 2011, nearly 90 per cent of Facebook usage in Arab countries was dedicated to organising action, managing individuals, and spreading information. Entertainment and games were the least of their priorities.
Crowdsourced infra
But internet-savvy youngsters like Hrishikesh have contributed in other ways, too. “The whole lot of other information that helped in the rescue mission were put up on social media. Route maps, safety tips, cleaning tips, health tips were all evolved through collaboration,” he said.
The two maps on the official keralarescue.in website, for instance, is the result of a massive crowdsourcing effort. One has mapped inundated roads in the state. “Those in the state and outside called up their friends and relatives in flood-affected areas to contribute to the creation of the map. The inundated areas are shown in red, and this has helped the rescue teams to plan their route efficiently,” Hrishikesh said. Once the waters have receded from a certain stretch, anyone can enter the site and unmark the area. Sreejith Parappayi, a Malayali based in Malaysia, has also created a Facebook page titled 'Kerala Safe Routes,' which keeps updating about the condition of road and rail travel through the flood-ravaged regions.
The other map on keralarescue.in shows all the 3,274 relief camps spread across the state. This again was a crowdsourced activity. In fact, the entire tech node for keralarescue.in was created not by those in the government payroll but a motley crowd of coders seated in various parts of the globe. “Hundreds of Malayali coders working for tech giants like Microsoft and Google and Uber had worked to improve the site that functioned as a one-stop shop for all rescue needs,” a top IT official in the chief minister's team said.
Surreal collective instinct
In the initial phase, the social media activity threatened to go out of hand. Many rescue messages were being repeated. This had even caused navy helicopters to fly over houses from where people had already been evacuated. But this virtual army, like an organic system adapting to atmospheric changes, did an amazing self-adjustment process.
“By the middle of the second day, people started to follow up. They either deleted their earlier message or posted an update,” said Adarsh. No one asked them to do it. All of them together, as if bound by some collective instinct, did it. It was also found that relief materials were being dumped in more accessible relief centres like the one in Kalamassery. The inacessible ones in North Paravur were severely short of stuff. This prompted a round of frenzied networking that led to supplies being shifted from surplus areas to deficit ones. The collective instinct at work, yet again.
Literacy (over 93%) and high mobile penetration (65%) could be factors that helped the social media upsurge in the time of crisis.
Ugly side
Social media's ugly face was also revealed during the flood crisis. There were FB posts like “Don’t donate to Kerala. More than half the state is Muslims and Christians. Let them suffer for what they are trying to do for Sabarimalai. They are messing with the wrong god.” For several social media 'activists,' many things about Kerala had upset the gods like the beef-eating population. Even Kerala women seeking permission to go inside Sabarimala was a big 'crime.'
