Many Twitter users have come together to gather information about power cuts in India and make an infographic map. It aims to map the geographical spread of power cuts across the country.

According to Shefaly Yogendra, a London-based investment consultant who rolled out this initiative said, one can participate in this initiative by tweeting #powercutindia. On the other hand, Ajay Kumar, a software engineer, put up a web page that had started mapping power cuts in the country on the basis of the tagged tweets. Now the page can be accessed at http://powercuts.in. A Twitter account by the name of @PowerCutsIn has also been employed to collect data.

First city to be mapped, was Gurgaon. In the first couple of days, 46 reports had been mapped, at a rate of 9.2 reports a day. These reports have further been sorted into categories of “planned”, “unplanned”, “good news” (indicating no power cuts) and “voltage”.

An open Google document, which anyone can read, edit and shared, was also floated online, where people volunteered to do the data crunching and provide tech support. Those involved are trying to take this beyond an empty data-visualisation exercise and trying to figure out what to do with it.

Source:Times of India