Infosys Executive Chairman N R Narayana Murthy on Friday asked coders and developers to come up with enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to manage natural calamities.
He was delivering the keynote address to kickstart the ‘Code for India Hackathon’ here hosted by internet giant Google. The two-day event will see coders, developers and programmers come up with solutions after a number of NGOs present their problems.
Murthy said most of the five lakh non-governmental organisations in the country worked without ERP software, putting them into “uncomfortable” situations.
“My wife tells me that the biggest problem in India in handling calamities is not the lack of resources, but the lack of management and systems,” he said.
Murthy said when Infosys participated in tsunami relief efforts, his wife Sudha Murty found there was plenty of resources, which came from all over the world. “Unfortunately there was no basic system to keep track of what came, what was needed, matching supply and demand and so on,” he said.
Murthy said if hackathon experts can come out with a set of simple systems to handle natural calamities and make it available, then it will be a very significant contribution.
He said though India has made significant progress in several areas in the last 65 years, it still had serious problems in education, healthcare, nutrition and shelter. “We still have a long way to go,” Murthy said.
Code for India founder Karl Mehta, who addressed participants in Bangalore via a video conference from Mountain View, California, said the event is the first ever US-India parallel hackathon. “It is also the largest hackathon as we have had 1,200 registrations from Bangalore alone. The previous record was held by Los Angeles Hacks event that saw 800 participants,” Mehta said.