Over one million people are sheltered in 3,274 relief camps in Kerala. As relief efforts for the Kerala floods gathered pace, tracking of the aid inventory was becoming a big problem for the state and local administration. Techies in Kerala have now come together to develop an inventory tracking software to solve this problem.
Hundreds of IT workers from Technopark in Thiruvananthapuram joined hands under the aegis of Prathidhwani (a socio-cultural collective program) to run a ‘Kerala Needs’ help desk. The website is put together for effective collaboration between various stakeholders involved in the relief work. The district administration has adopted the tracking software designed by techies.
The call center setup at the Technopark Club is matching relief material with those having supply in that region. Another group of techies were running a relief material collection center. The work on the software began on Sunday afternoon, by the night time, these techies gave the demonstration of the software to district administration.
More than 50 truck loads of relief material has been set from the collection center run by Prathidhwani. The work on the software started after the District Collector got in touch with the developer's team, explaining the particular problem of inventory tracking. The team delivered the working software to the district administration within a short period of time.
Nishin, a member of the development team spent some time at the collection centers, studied the workflow and quickly put together the application. The software was implemented at the relief-material collection centers, the software is keeping all the records of all the inventory up-to-date. The company management and Technopark management have been supportive of these efforts. Some of the IT firms are letting the employees on the bench to join these initiatives.
Kerala’s tech workforce is one of the first to respond to mitigate the crisis. Within hours after the tragedy, techies and volunteers from Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Kerala’s IT cell built the entire tech node for keralarescue.in. Within a few days, 1585 developers volunteered to improve the website.
IT professionals from the state that employed in global companies are doing their own bit to support the relief operations. These techies are flexing their high-level contracts in global IT firms to raise private donations to Chief Minister’s Disaster Relief Funds.