Need a bed? How this student-run initiative built India's largest hospital bed repository for COVID patients

If you are active on any social media platform, it would have been hard for you to miss the requests from numerous people, seeking hospital beds for COVID patients. This has escalated a lot recently, especially after the COVID second wave gathered its strength in most Indian states. We are now going to tell you about a solution.

If you're in search of a bed for a COVID patient, all you need to do is go to findabed.in and type the name of the city or the pincode where you need a bed. It will immediately list all the available beds in hospitals and quarantine centres near you. Find A Bed, which is believed to be the first national repository of COVID centres in India is an initiative by a youth organisation called India's International Movement to Unite Nations.

Aaryan Prem, a 15-year-old from Bengaluru, who interns with the organisation tells us that all it took them was a night to compile the data. "The internship mostly includes developing content for the Mock UN events. When the second wave began, one day, we were told that our next goal is to build the country's largest repository of beds," he says. Following this, Aaryan says around 200-odd teenagers who interns for the organisation right now worked towards searching for hospitals and quarantine centres across the country. "We did not leave a single pincode and did something even the government couldn't do," he says.

Apart from this, IIMUN also has a set of Cause Ambassadors, who are contributing towards new beds. Their ambassadors include Kriti Sanon, Richa Chaddha and Karan Johar, who are using their platforms to gather more information.