Remote medical aid. Business in the time of COVID-19. Connectedness while maintaining physical distance. All of these would not have been possible should technology not have existed – and should we not have leveraged it. But we did, and here we are.
At Mahindra, having a challenger spirit lies at the core of our philosophy. We believe in going beyond the ‘what if’s, and innovatively coming up with solutions to every challenge that comes our way. The novel coronavirus made us sit up and ask ourselves – how can we help our communities safely and steadily come out of this? And we found an answer in technology.
Going digital for health
Apart from this, we leveraged our digital abilities on various initiative –
Leveraging AI
The R&D arm of our tech business, Makers Lab, has been using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to research and find drugs that could treat COVID-19
“Tech Mahindra is not only committed to ensure the well-being of our employees, customers and partner ecosystem, but we are also invested in finding a potential cure for COVID-19 by leveraging cutting-edge and futuristic technologies like AI.”
CP Gurnani
MD & CEO, Tech Mahindra
Understanding the nature of the virus – since it’s useless if it cannot enter the host cell – the aim was to find out ways to ensure the preventing its entry itself.
Tackling misinformation
While we did not intend to create an exhaustive repository of information – we’d want to leave that to the experts and designated authorities – we did want to tackle any opportunity of misinformation or confusion within the Mahindra Universe. And we’ve made this information public, for whoever could benefit from it. You can view this handy information around COVID-19 on our microsite. We also released a list of myth-busters to clear confusion around Coronavirus.
Safe-distancing & work from home
While we are working towards supporting various healthcare initiatives, with the lockdown being lifted across the country, safety is another point of focus at the moment. We have been ideating and implementing protocol and standard operating procedures, offline. But more importantly, we’re also leveraging technology to ensure working from home is a seamless experience for employees.
Medical aid: The need of the hour
With the pandemic, social distancing norms were put in place, and most urgently, we understood that there may be a need for ventilators. Without batting an eyelid, our teams collaborated with medical professionals and came up with low-cost ventilators (commonly known as the AMBU bag respirators), which they call as AIR100.
Technology may not be able to tackle the very occurrence of pandemics. But, it will most definitely help us find solutions and hopefully also speedily arrive at a cure.
Resuming business is important. But doing so while ensuring everyone’s safety, is crucial. This is how the Mahindra Group is following post-lockdown protocol and welcoming back employees in a safe and sanitised environment.
Never before has humanity shone brighter in the face of a crisis. This is a record of how we’ve come together in this fight. This is a reminder, that there is light at the end of the tunnel.