How Chennai volunteers developed free digital apps to fight Covid

One of the greatest threats during this pandemic, apart from the virus, of course, is misinformation. With fake news exploding rapidly across social media, the need to have a trusted source for citizen-focused information has become necessary.

With this goal in mind, a team of citizen volunteers in Chennai have created free apps with information that's helpful for city residents.

Helmed by Shyam Sundar, an engineer working in an automotive company, the social initiative started as 'Covid19Chennai' in March 2020 and has now been rebranded as 'News of Chennai' (NoC).

"The foundational principle of this service has remained the same: to publish cross-verifiable, fact-checked information helpful to anyone in Chennai in times of need through social media channels," Sundar says.

Sharing varied information

How does the team compile information?

"The information updated in app and social media channels of 'NoC' is taken from trusted sources like the Tamil Nadu government, Greater Chennai Corporation, Greater Chennai Police and journalists from reputed media houses," explains Sundar. "I also include crowdsourced information and verify it before sharing."

Screenshots of the NoC app created by the Chennai-based volunteers

Sundar started this alone by curating such data during the early pandemic days and later began creating the app.

"I am a no-code enthusiast. I use multiple no-code tools to web apps of NoC. It is a progressive web app which means there is no need to download it. It can be directly saved as an app on mobile home screen right from the browser," he says. "App gets updated automatically without any intervention. It is also 100 per cent privacy-focused and collects zero data."

Food directory for quarantined residents

As his initiative started to grow, Sundar soon found help from his friends. Murshitha Sheereen, a photographer and entrepreneur, had earlier made a list of meal service providers during the second Covid wave.

Sundar joined her, along with IT professionals Jayalakshmi Krishnan and Ferdina Innocent, and writer Aprajitha Suryanarayanan, to create 'Food Help Chennai' – a directory to find home-cooked food from verified food home chefs and catering services for those who are affected by Covid and are unable to cook at home

Food Help Chennai is a directory to find home-cooked food from verified food home chefs and catering services

"Our teammate, Jayalakshmi built the app, while Shyam, Murshitha, Aparajitha and I took up verification of all the information that would be available on the app," says Innocent. "Verifying the information was crucial because the list had meal service providers who were operating during the second wave and we needed to be sure if they were still doing it. A lot of them were home kitchens and cloud kitchens as well."

She goes on to add that the team also "wanted to provide detailed information on restaurants, kitchens or caterers like their areas and days of service, provide all three meals and if they have vegetarian or non-vegetarian food options".

"Another useful field is delivery mode because in case of lockdown and Dunzo, Porter, Genie are not operating, you can find meal service providers who have their own delivery partners," Innocent says, and signs off with, "We called every number from our old list, added more that we found on Twitter and verified them."

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