All domestic and international flight operations were suspended by the union government with the implementation of lockdown on 25th March 2020 to contain the spread of Coronavirus in the country. However, the transportation of medical supplies and essentials goods needs to be ensured to even a remote part of the country.

Foreseeing a difficult situation ahead, on March 26, the Ministry of Civil Aviation has launched “Lifeline UDAN”, an initiative to ensure a steady supply of essentials through airways to even the most remote parts of India.

“Lifeline UDAN” initiative and its ICT requirements A task force of 15 officers was constituted by the Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) under the leadership of Smt. Usha Padhee, Joint Secretary, MoCA to coordinate with various stakeholders viz state governments, Ministry of Health & Family Welfare (MoHFW), Indian Airforce, AirIndia, Airport operators, private Airlines, Cargo handling entities etc., to ensure that essential supplies of medicine and goods reach to the destination on time. For initial 2-3 days, the coordination task was executed with the help of instant messaging apps like WhatsApp etc., however, soon it was realized that it will be difficult to manage with increasing load. Accordingly, NIC-MoCA was given the task to put in place an online portal within 2-3 days through which the stakeholders like state government, ICMR, etc., can put forth their consignment requirement and IAF, AirIndia and private airlines etc., can put forth their offering/ services without any manual intervention.

Role of NIC Joint Secretary (IT), Shri Amber Dubey was instrumental in communicating the exact requirement of the online system that is required by the ministry to manage this huge task and its paramount importance in the prevailing situation.

NIC-MoCA had proactively taken up this task under the guidance DDG Shri S K Sinha to develop and launch the required portal within 3 days with all essential functionalities as per requirements. The portal was enhanced with more user-friendly options like mobile-ready web interface and pre-filled forms to save time in form filling by the stakeholders.

Features and functionalities of the Lifeline UDAN portal A detailed description of the features and functionalities of the portal are as below: • Responsive web design - works seamlessly on mobile devices • User registration and login • User-friendly e-forms to upload/edit flight details for AirIndia, IAF and private cargo airlines and tracking status of each flight • User-friendly e-forms to upload/edit consignment details for state governments and nodal officers from ICMR, NIMR, BSF, India Post etc • Provided the auto-fill option to reduce form filling time to 2-3 minutes for repeat records • Record generation and status keeping • Auto archival of flight and consignment records by system scheduler in case the status is not updated to “executed” in 72 hours • Option to search/filter/query/sort records and export output in excel/pdf • Option to export a consignment record in PDF to be forwarded to AirCargo control group through WhatsApp group • Option to generate and export ‘daily planned flights report’ and ‘consignment requests report’ in Excel and PDF by air cargo control group of M/o Civil Aviation for preparing daily Lifeline programme • A dashboard page to display graphical line charts depicting the cumulative number of Lifeline UDAN flight operated, amount of cargo carried and total aerial distance covered. Dashboard page and website ticker is auto-updated through admin login • Public information is updated on daily basis on the ‘public_info’ page • List of nodal officers section on website footer to get contact details of nodal officers of MoCA, State Governments, Air India, Other Airlines, Airports Authority of India, PPP Airports, AAICLAS, Cargo Handling Entities, Ground Handling Entities • A photo gallery section to upload/ display photographs through ‘Admin’

Technology Stack: Java/JavaEE5, Spring Boot2.2, Postgres SQL9.4, Bootstrap 4.2, iText5. Portal URL: https://esahaj.gov.in/lifeline_udan/login