Engineers Build App To Help People Get Essential Goods In COVID-19 Lockdown

When the COVID-19 lockdown was announced, chaos spread around the nation, people running helter-skelter trying to get food supplies.

And while most did manage to get some ration for the night, what would happen later? Three software engineers teamed up to answer this very question and they decided to act quickly with a phone-based solution.

PTI

They created a community-based app called COVID Maps that allows people in a certain locality to mark stores and constantly update about stocks in the stores, or the open hours of the stores to allow people to get the supplies they need during the easement hours of the day.

The innovative app also helps to update people with information about crowd, hygiene, among other factors to help people be prepared.

Today the web app boasts over 6000 active users with a user base of over 35,000, and over 1500 that regularly keep updating information.

We got to interact with Phani Kishan Addepalli who works as a lead for Strategy & Investments at Swiggy. Other two team members who¡¯ve helped in creating COVID Maps include Sanjeev Rao who is currently working as a product manager with a D2C furniture company Article in Vancouver and Arjun Attam who works as a Program Manager at Microsoft.

Twitter: Phani, Sanjeev and Arjun

How did the idea for COVID Maps surface

We asked Phani, how the idea for COVID Maps arise in their mind. He said, ¡°Sanjeev is the guy who came up with the idea. We were ex-college mates & colleagues in Swiggy and were talking about problems that we could help solve in the context of COVID-19. This was around the time PM Modi was making his address on the lockdown (post the Janata curfew).¡±

He added, ¡°In our conversation, we realized the problems faced in Vancouver (where Sanjeev stays right now) was very similar to those in India (store availability, timings, crowds etc) and thought it could be a solution that can be helpful across the world. Arjun is a good friend of Sanjeev from Vancouver and was a coder - so he roped him in soon after.¡±

Backed by Human Intelligence

We wanted to learn what secret sauce or tech that they¡¯re using to help populate information, to which, Phani revealed that they aren¡¯t relying on Artificial Intelligence for this, instead they¡¯re relying on ¡®Human Intelligence¡¯.

COVID Maps

He said, ¡°Currently our solution relies on human intelligence than machines. By ensuring that we surface the right information, it will be up to the judgement of the user to make use of the same - for example, if there is a store for which two users indicate that the wait-times are about 20 mins and three others said eggs were not available, the user can infer that this store has reasonably large wait times with issues on stock availability. We are going to keep the solution itself simple and rely on users to promote reviews that they think have been helpful/accurate.¡±

Crafting a practical solution for India

Sure, a solution like this would work effectively abroad, but bring that to India and the need for a more dynamic approach arises.

Phani said, ¡°The biggest challenge we face be it in India / abroad is the "cold-start" problem. In a new city, given we have no users, we won't have any reviews and given no reviews we have no users coming in. To solve this we need to "seed" the first 20-30 high-quality listings (which we are doing through the help of the volunteers).¡±

He added, ¡°Further, this needs to be hyperlocal - you wouldn't want to travel say even 5kms to get your essentials. Getting hyperlocal high-quality data is a big challenge and we are addressing this through a bunch of volunteers called "Community Leaders" who will be responsible for nurturing and growing the city initially. Once we hit critical mass, the flywheels flow in automatically.¡±

Reuters

Happiness after helping people across the world

Phani shared the happiness and satisfaction the team members received after launching COVID Maps, stating, ¡°When we started out we had no idea it would be able to hit such a scale in such a short period of time. The fact that we could help 35k+ people in this time of crisis in less than 10 days is unbelievable! The support we have received from the community is tremendous.¡±

He added, ¡°We now have almost 20-30 volunteers spending a good amount of time helping out with keeping up the operations as well as expanding. Recently one of our volunteers built out a Hindi version of the app, so it can help people who aren't comfortable with English as well. Being able to build this community as we look to tackle the pandemic is hugely rewarding.¡±