After carpool app in 2016, teen builds portal to connect migrant workers with employers

Gurgaon: The pandemic has forced thousands of migrant workers away from industries that used to provide them livelihood, and that need their labour now to recover from the lockdown. And a precocious 17-year-old from Noida has found a way to connect these two groups with a website called Bharatshramik.com.
“The workers have to put in their name, number and the pin code of the area where they are looking for work. Their details are then updated in a database shared with the employers in sectors such as construction, hospitality and manufacturing, among others,” said Akshat Mittal, who developed the platform that went live on June 20 and has already attracted 18,000 workers.
To register, a worker simply has to call the number provided on the website and mention their skills and pin-code of the area they want to work in. The call is received by an employee of a communication service provider Mittal has engaged, who updates the data on the website. Employers can go through this database and select suitable workers for their locality.
Mittal and his team has reached out to social organisations to inform migrant workers about this platform and its provisions. He said that most of the workers who have registered are from Bihar, and the rest from states like Uttar Pradesh and Orissa. To ensure that most migrant workers can easily navigate the site, the content is displayed in ten Indian languages.
Mittal is a commerce student and has just appeared for his Class XII board exams. But this is not the first time he used technology to solve a social problem. In 2016, he had developed a carpooling app to help commuters when Delhi had announced the odd-even rule to curb pollution. His app was later bought by a startup.
This year in May, a conversation with his 80-year-old grandfather moved him, and made him realise how lives have been disrupted since the lockdown. “My grandfather told me that his driver, who had worked for him for the past eight years and was like a family member, had to leave his job and go back to his village in Bihar because of the pandemic. When he told that he has to go the market all by himself to buy groceries, risking an infection, my eyes filled with tears,” he shared.
Soon, he started working on the design of this platform, and with help from his friends Atipriya Dev Sinha, Mihir Soni and Ashish Agarwal, gave shape to the idea. “We have been working passionately for the past 3 weeks to be able to launch the platform. We are also taking feedback from our users and improving consistently,” Mittal said.
Apart from industries, families or individuals can also hire domestic helpers from the website. The site has offered a glimmer of hope to the people for whom the last three months have been a nightmare. Firdaus Alam, 23, says he found out about the platform and decided to give it a try. "I used to work in Andhra but lost my job. I registered here and am hoping to get a job soon," he added.