Warring MPs join hands to help innovators fight coronavirus

They may sit on the opposite sides of the political spectrum but the fight against COVID-19 has brought 14 MPs from various parties, including Congress and BJP, together on a common platform to collaborate with venture capitalists and experts fund innovative ideas to tackle the pandemic.

The Parliamentarians with Innovators for India (PII), the new forum, seeks to identify the best solutions and help innovators in reaching out to authorities and executing it at state and district levels.

The PII, which will be holding its first meeting on Wednesday, has Congress leaders Manish Tewari, Rajeev Gowda and Karti Chidambaram, BJP's Sudhanshu Trivedi, Varun Gandhi and GVL Narasimha Rao, Trinamool Congress' Mohua Moitra, Shiv Sena's Priyanka Chaturvedi and BSP's Danish Ali among others as members. Samajwadi Party leader Ghanshyam Tiwari, Congress' Anil K Antony and Manipur Chief Minister's advisor Rajat Sethi are among the coordinators.

"The COVID-19 response is for public champions across the country to come together to fight the gloom and doom scenario and work towards lifting the public spirit. PII aims to enable meaningful collaboration between citizens, parliamentarians, and industry leaders who wish to make a difference to our communities and our country during this difficult time. COVID-19 is a common enemy and we must come together to fight it," the coordinators said.

The group has brought in venture capitalists and experts together will identify technology-based solutions that can make an impact on a large-scale in a short span of time. The MPs will take the selected projects to state authorities to implement it.

"We are going to reach out across party lines. We will work together to overcome these troubled times," Gowda said.

"This is the time we need to come together, understand together, act together because we are facing the most severe and extensive crisis of mankind. So an effective, coherent effort is needed," Trivedi added.

The PII has invited proposals for tools on exhaustive case detection, immediate testing and isolation, intense contact tracing and rigorous quarantine of close contacts, modelling estimates of COVID-19 disease burden, progression and impact of various interventions like lockdown and social distancing, data analytics and forecasting for planning, solutions for COVID-19 efforts in slums, relief camps, prisons, elderly care or other challenging settings as well as solutions to support unintended consequences of the pandemic response, including the increase in domestic violence and alcohol withdrawal among others.

Congress MP Konda Vishweshwara Reddy is one of the first to come up to help the proposal to develop low-cost ventilators while organisers said they have received commitments from several others.