When the Smart India Hackathon was postponed due to the outbreak of COVID-19, the team from Mahindra Ecole Centrale College of Engineering, Hyderabad was quite disappointed. It also worried them to know how many people could be affected by the deadly virus and they wanted to do something about it. That's when their professor Achal Agrawal came up with an idea.
Like with most other things this season, this idea too dealt with Coronavirus.
Raghav NS, one of the students from the team met up with Agrawal who came up with an idea on how they can help, "The professor told me that he had come across a picture of a map on social media depicting the cases in some places but had seen that it wasn't very accurate and it wasn't created well. So he suggested that we create a district-tracker that can provide accurate information about cases in every district in the country. Try and do it within a week," he suggested.
Now, there is a reason why the professor only gave the student a week and a reason why he was even suggesting such an idea. It was because the students' hackathon project was based on the same sort of principles and methods - just a few tweaks here and there and all their headwork towards their hackathon project would not just not go to waste but could end up having a much bigger impact.
That night Raghav sat down to create the Two Tracker, he was done by the morning. He only took about 4-5 hours. "Though the Two Tracker is not similar in any way to our project, the software involved is not very different. So everything was already ready, so it only took me a few hours. The overall flowchart of the process and the way it worked was the same. Basically the architecture of the Two was the same, so I just had to change some of the codes," he explained."We also saw how many people were panicking and so we immediately assembled a team and within a week we got it running," he added.
Besides Raghav, the others on the team are Ananta Srikar, Rishab Ramanathan, Rohith Gilla, Anchit Sharma and V. Meghana Reddy under the guidance of faculty Achal Agrawal, Bharghava Rajaram and Raj Narayana
The tracker allows you to move the cursor to any part of the map and one can find out the number of cases and deaths in the area. There are three teams involved - development team which manages the website, visuals and backend, another team keeps a tab on all the information and fed into the automated system. The other team fact checks all the material that they are receiving.
"No one has done anything like this here. And we feel we have a good design because we have also ensured to use colours that are calming. A map we saw was coloured red and I personally felt more disturbed by it, so we wanted to go with calmer colours in this tracker," he explained. The teams have been fully dedicated to the working of the tracker and are constantly updating it with latest information and they have assured that they only rely on credible sources such as the Ministry of health, Pharmaceutical Technology and reputed news outlets. and fact check every number.
The district-tracker was created to help those travelling in the country to avoid virus-prone zones, now with the shut-down travelling is curbed but it also helps authorities mobilise resources more efficiently.
Check out the site here - https://covindia.netlify.com
