In J&K’s Udhampur District, an ~550,000 population is spread across landslide and snow-damage prone landscapes spanning altitudes of 600–3,000 meters. Till date, this has meant that it would take months for disaster relief claims to reach and then be processed by District Headquarters, with great tedium and travel cost to both the state and its citizen claimants, among other challenges.

In 2018, the Udhampur District Administration led by IAS Dr. Piyush Singla, realized that the solution was to ‘go digital’. They employed Mobiquel to help carry out this task.

When we took up the project, we knew that the digital portal we create would have to be robust but simple. The mobile app’s incident feeding screen for Level 1 Field Officials would need to work offline because the difficult terrains where disaster victims often reside lacks internet connectivity. To meet the State Disaster Relief Fund’s recommended guidelines, the app would have to reliably record geo-tagged proofs and photographs in the built-in Incident Information Template. We’d need to ensure that the app had functions for both government officials as well as citizens. With these considerations and many more, we carefully crafted our app, Sakoon and in 2018 it was piloted, and subsequently implemented in the district administrative workflow.

Now, neither government officials nor citizens have to make multiple arduous and expensive trips across the district, the need for physical paper-stacks has been removed, the chain of approvals involves only a few button-clicks, and automated calculations and record-keeping means fewer errors and no information loss due to illegibility. What’s more, citizens can keep track of their claims nearly real time, which leads to increased transparency and accountability. The app also features the entire hierarchy of officials from Level 1 (Patwari) all the way up to Level 7 (District Collector).

After Sakoon was implemented, the average claim processing time went down from nearly 200 days to just 18 days. Not to mention, the whole process became significantly more environmentally sustainable. Furthermore, data recording and analytics could one day lead to the identification of vulnerable populations and regions, enabling greater disaster damage/loss prevention.

In 2020, at the 23rd National Conference on e-Governance, Sakoon won the Gold Award under Category 3. As of 2023, Sakoon is available and in regular use both as a web interface and a mobile application. It is being adapted for scaling to other districts in J&K and beyond.