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IIITH Research Student’s Timely Effort At Building Initial Prototype of Portal Finds On-Field Application

With the local civic body, Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) recently unveiling a portal to streamline relief operations in the city, we have our own Dual Degree student, Anukul Sangwan to thank for his timely contribution towards the initial prototype. Find out more below.

The good news for Hyderabadis is that the city is not short of philanthropists and donors. The bad news however is that mapping calls for help with volunteers or organizations willing to engage in supply and distribution of food and essential items is turning out to be a logistical nightmare for authorities. Compounding the problem is the lockdown constraint necessitating minimal congregation and movement of people in the city. In fact, finding multiple volunteer organizations and consequent crowds at free food distributions, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation issued a press release warning of stern action if any distribution was undertaken without informing government officials. The idea was not to dissuade volunteers but a pressing need to ease governance and put both the government and the NGOs on the same page was felt.

It was to find a tech solution to this problem of aggregating demand and decentralizing supply and distribution that Ashhar Farhan, founder of cultural space, LaMakaan in association with Anant Maringanti of Hyderabad Urban Lab (HUL) Foundation approached the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. When the institute’s coordinator with the duo, Prof Kavita Vemuri, reached out to the student and research community soliciting help in creating a portal that could visually represent where help was needed in the city, Anukul Sangwan, 4th year Dual Degree student at the Software Engineering Research Centre (SERC) volunteered. Building the website from scratch in record time, the open source enthusiast’s initial efforts have made it possible to be handed over to the NGO groups. These groups in turn had to add many more features as per constant discussions with the government agencies before it was made public on the 22 April 2020. Prior to the government making a formal announcement, Farhan and others were running it accepting close to 5,000 calls a day for the city of Hyderabad alone.

COVID123: What Is It
Covid123.in is a location-based web application designed to organise relief operations, currently managed by GHMC, and the state government as per the latest version released by Farhan and other NGOs. From tracking requests for help that are arising due to the COVID-19 outbreak and the ensuing lockdown, to enlisting as a donor (for money, food, rations or clothes) or as a volunteer, it is a one-stop place for collating and viewing information too. “One can find out about the nearest isolation wards, Annapurna canteens, and even labour addas,” says Kavita. The interface is simplified for ease of usage, similar to a cab-hailing app like Uber or Ola. It uses a map that can geo-tag any user logging in to place a request. A request can also be placed on behalf of someone else by moving the pin to the beneficiary location. When the donors, volunteers and beneficiaries sign up by providing their details, GHMC gets in touch and coordinates the relief efforts in a centralized fashion. A dashboard functionality available on the site is designed to give authorities a visual guide on the kind of requests being logged area-wise, and the corresponding rescue efforts made.

The Tech
Since Anukul had been working on an open source project where he was using Golang and Typescript, his first instinct was to use the same in this NGO project. “On the frontend, web browsers only understand Javascript (which Typescript compiles with). For the backend, I initially wanted to use Go for better scalability, but I realised that to collaborate with other people, it’s easiest to use what they are most familiar with, so I decided to use Typescript here as well”, he explains. The website is hosted on the Heroku platform and uses the free and open source database, Postgres.

Real-Life Experiences
For someone whose primary motivation to take up Computer Science was to build things, it wasn’t surprising to find Anukul jumping in the fray when the request for the website was put out. “As a kid, I found it really interesting that one could build software and launch it on the internet for the whole world to use, so I always wanted to learn to do that.” he says. In fact, even as a fresher when he joined IIITH, he built a more accessible version of the online portal that is used by students for assignments. In that sense, he has had prior practice building these web apps. However in this real world scenario, the challenge was that the requirements were not defined. Terming the communication process among the stakeholders as the most difficult part, Anukul says, “It’s funny that I learned about this in Structured Systems Analysis and Design (SSAD) course. (Prof Raghu Reddy) Sir used to emphasize that requirements gathering is one of the most important parts in software development. I realised it in this effort”.

Kavita seems to agree when she says, ““From the initial prototype developed by Anukul to the one that was formally launched, a lot of new features and extensions to include more governmental departments have been added. But the laudable part was the shape the portal took at short notice, given the sketchy specs and the sudden changes as required by the agencies planning to use it. A learning from the above exercise, is the need to understand requirement specification, the domain knowledge (in this case, the logistics of procuring food and distribution, the safety/security of the personnel, how govt agencies work and last but not the least the expectations from the ordinary citizens), architecture and importantly the usability – all courses taught at IIITH as part of the core curriculum.” Post-pandemic, an app like this can be further developed for NGOs across the country or even the world to identify and reach out to the needy.