Covid-19 India site volunteers hopeful of handing over baton

Whether you’re a journalist, academic or just someone keen to know the latest data on the pandemic in India, chances are your first port of call is www.covid19india.org. That habit helped the website, run entirely by unnamed volunteers, rack up more than 4.4 billion visits since its launch in March 2020. It was thus natural that the group’s decision to stop updating the site at the end of October would be met with an outpouring of both gratitude and sadness. But the people behind the exhaustive effort said they are hopeful others will take up the baton, with many having reached out saying they would like to.

“In our absence, we are hopeful that someone else can fill in the space since most of the states are regular with bulletins now,” the volunteers, who prefer to stay anonymous, told ET in an email interview. “All our code and data is open sourced and anyone can fork our project (copy the repository and experiment) and continue if they wish to — in the spirit of how we’ve run the project till now, there’ll be no licensing or attribution associated with any of our code or data.”

The team, in a blog, had said they decided to step back after diligently updating the site every single day for the last 17 months, evoking a range of reactions. Former member of the PM’s economic advisory council Shamika Ravi had termed it an “extraordinary effort” and called on the government and others to sustain it in a tweet.


Ramdas Iyer, a regular user, commented on the group’s blog: “Looking at covid19india.org has of late become a habit, like sitting down with a glass of mellow single malt after sundown.”

While users suggested the group set up a donation link or carry ads on the site if that would help the team to keep going, the volunteers said there was never a need to, simply because of the frugal model they adopted with zero operating costs for the infrastructure, the only expense being for the domain name.

“The initiative has run on the goodwill of people who have given their time and energy selflessly,” they said. “And we feel it’s morally wrong to make money out of Covid. So monetisation or funding does not change our decision.”

For the group, one of the biggest learnings from the last year-and-a-half has been how it is possible for a collective to come together without any monetary benefit for the overall social good.

“Given that we have never run any advertisement on the website, that there has never been any association with any corporate, and that we’ve remained independent shows that not everything needs to be driven based on a profit model,” they said.

Covid19India provided a trusted source of data that all modelling groups could work with and is an amazing effort that stands testimony to the difference that committed volunteer groups can make, said Gautam Menon, professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University and an infectious disease modeller.

“Although the government has virtually infinite resources to do the same things, non-governmental organisations can summon up a fiery drive and commitment to making data public that is hard to match, also because they are not beholden to political masters,” he said.

The volunteers said they decided to cease their work at the end of October because with life and work “limping back to normalcy” it was time to focus on that, after having run the initiative for so long. Unlike when they started out in March 2020, credible alternatives for data are also available now, they said, suggesting Worldometer and ministry of health and family welfare as options, as well as the district-wise data many states have started publishing.

Another popular request has been for the over 300 volunteers to reveal who they are. The group said they had not done so till now because of their belief that the focus should be on the data, not individuals, since knowing who is handling the operations “does not benefit anyone”. But they added: “At the end of this mega experiment, we might collectively decide to put the names out. We are yet to decide on that.”