04.05.2024

So the one image that stands out in my head is of this little girl. She was no more than five or six years old and she was grinding a green chutney. She got displaced in the flood, on the roadside, just trying to survive. And everyone was going about their lives. There were no headlines around this flood. The city was going on with its life business as usual. And yet there were over 100,000 families that were hit. They were right there on the roadside. My name is Anshu Sharma. I work for Seeds. It is a nonprofit organization working across South Asia to improve the efficiency of disaster relief, responding to disasters and preparing for them.

I was born in Delhi and this is where I've grown up. In our culture and our value system, environment is very deeply ingrained. Right from childhood, we learned to literally worship various elements of nature, plants, trees, animals. So if there's one thing that I can say about Anshu as a person, I think he has a lot of compassion and wisdom in him. And in some ways I think he's reached some level of enlightenment. He's a problem solver, but at the same time, he can look at the bigger picture. Within the domain of disaster management, the entire focus has been on responding to impacts that we see unfolding.

If you really want to eliminate that disaster, that loss of lives, that loss of property from happening, we try to see what's happening on the side of the people that makes them vulnerable. That puts them to this risk. AI for us is a tool to make invisible people visible. The one dataset that is available for every house in the world and available at the same standard is satellite imagery. We can see the size of the house, that building, we can see the material of the house. From the material, we can infer a lot about the house. All of this is used to infer further risk level of that building.

Our AI work is based on a roof type identification model. This model uses satellite imagery. The way that Seeds works is through a very wide network of local organizations who would very quickly be able to respond to an emergency, go down and study places and give warnings to people. In this whole spectrum, the east, where we go and engage with communities is critical to us. This is where we are able to bring the world of technology and community based approaches together. Change is certainly possible and I believe change cannot be driven from outside. And that's what the work of Seeds is all about.