The Central government is now offering online training for health workers including doctors and midwives, state officials, police organisations such as NCC, NSS, and other volunteers to help fight the COVID-19 pandemic. India's first line of workers is already engaged in COVID-19 relief, the Ministry of Personnel's memo said, but "a larger force will be needed to replace the first line" and to deal with "exponential or geometric increase" in COVID-19 positive cases in the subsequent stages of the pandemic. Called iGOT — Integrated Govt. Online Training — the platform will be hosted on the Human Resources Development Ministry's DIKSHA platform. which has been "retrofitted" to the purpose requested by the Central government's Empowered Group chaired by Arun Panda, secretary in the Ministry of Micro, Small & Medium Enterprises. This particular group is among the 11 such groups formed by the Home Ministry under the Disaster Management Act to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. iGOT offers courses on sample collection, quarantine and isolation, COVID-19 training for NCC cadets, ICU care and ventilation management, among other things. The courses will load on only Firefox and Chrome, but the ministry has prescribed that all content should easily load on mobile phones. The Health ministry has prescribed minimum standards for the courses, such as prescribed length of tutorials, aspect ratio, quality of video, etc. At the time of publication, India had over 4,900 positive cases of COVID-19, and 137 people have died from the virus.
