12-year-olds evolve code to end relief centre chaos

Thiruvananthapuram: A bunch of 12-year-old kids at Pangode, a village at the far west of Thiruvananthapuram district, have created a site that would end the chaos at the relief camps across the state. The site, encamp.in, has two major purposes. One, to remove the complexities of reaching relief materials to hundreds of relief centres. Two, to handhold the evacuees until they have settled back to normalcy. Over 100 relief camps have already joined encamp.in.

The children, eighth standard students of Krishnavilasam Upper Primary School in Pangode, have created modules for the first task of setting the relief process in order, and are perfecting the second. The kids have also formed themselves into a company, Grolius. They have created eight modules to streamline aid flow into relief camps: camp, refugee, doctors, food, medicines, materials, requests, and resources.

“Each refugee camp will be given a unique login,” said Alamsha A S, the 12-year-old chief information officer of Grolius. “We have created a system where all that a camp requires, right from pampers to doctors, will be listed on the site. The status of the inventory will be given. Say, if there was a requirement for 200 bedsheets, it will be there for everyone to see. But once the bedsheets are delivered to the camp, the requirement will be deleted. Then, everyone will know that this camp does not require bedsheets,” Alamsha said.

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The medical status of each person in the camp will also be similarly listed. “If someone requires dialysis, a request can be instantly put up. If medicines for pressure or diabetes are required, another request can be put up,” Alamsha said.

The relief process, given the enormity of the disaster, was mostly driven by desperation. “People were so selfless in this moment of crisis that there was an oversupply of relief materials,” said Janaki Pillai, a vounteer at a relief camp in the capital. “Problem was no one knew exactly which camp needed what. As a result food and other supplies worth crores have been wasted,” she said. There are relief centres where supplies are dumped and others where evacuees have not enough to eat and drink. There were times when five doctors rushed to one centre while the rest had the services of none.

It took just two days for the Grolius team to come up with the code to rectify this distorted relief supply. Alamsha said the Grolius team was now working on the follow-up mission. For this they are mentored by Talrop, a group of young software engineers whose main aim is to demystify technology. “The kids are now creating a programme to categorise the losses of refugees,” said Safeer, one of the 40-odd Talrop engineers mentoring the kids. (Thanks to Talrop engineers, these eighth standard kids have an expert understanding of front-end or browser-side languages like HTML, CSS and JavaScript and also the server-side language of Python and its framework Django,” Safeer said.)

“The module will list out the losses suffered by each refugee in a camp. There will be a wishlist of sorts for each refugee, which we will keep ticking. The person will be taken off the refugee list only when the last of his requirement has been satisfied, and the column ticked,” Safeer said.

'Map of loss'

Such an exercise has other advantages. “This will give a clear picture of who lost what, and the extent of their losses, to individuals and organisations willing to extend help. There will be a transparent list of the number of people who have lost their homes, businesses, jobs, crops, household articles, anything. This will help both the government and private individuals to target their assistance,” Safeer said. In short, encamp.in will give a comprehensive “map of loss”. Perhaps, the biggest advantage of encamp.in is that the site has been developed in an open source platform. “Anyone can host this on their server and use it. Developing the encamp.in site was the children's way of joining in the relief effort. The code is open to anyone to improve and implement,” Safeer said.

The massive follow-up mission, however, requires the services of a large group of volunteers who can talk to the refugees, list out their issues, and then do the follow up. Safeer said there are 200 already. Many more are required. Those ready to volunteer contact 9746323312/9400324813.

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