SUMURR (Sustainable Urban Mobility with Uncompromised Rural Reach) is
a private-public partnership (PPP) between the Ford Motor Company, the U.S.
Department of State, the University of Michigan, George Washington
University, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras), and the
Indian healthcare NGO Hand in Hand. The partnership objective is to launch
a pilot that leverages OpenXC, a recently introduced Ford technology, to
improve maternal mortality rates in rural areas outside of Chennai, India.
The School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) team
engaged in secondary research and visited Chennai twice to carry out primary
research. By the end of the second trip to Chennai, the PPP had determined
that the goal of the pilot was to use the SUMURR vehicle and technology to
increase the mobility of the government healthcare worker, called a Village
Health Nurse (VHN), and improve her ability to enter patient information
accurately into PICME, the government database that registers and tracks
health data of pregnant mothers. Hand in Hand will be the local partner that
works with high-risk pregnant mothers in rural villages and Ford will develop
applications for maternal health in partnership with IIT Madras.
The pilot’s success depends on whether Ford hires a Project Manager
to ensure that the partners communicate and each partner’s milestones are
achieved. It also depends on whether the rural communities and the Tamil
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Nadu State Government respond positively to the pilot. If the pilot is
successful, its long-term scalability depends on whether Ford can find a way
to monetize the product and sell it at a price point that is affordable.