Hyderabad: The Covid war room consisting of IIIT students in Hyderabad and students, saved many precious lives during the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic.
The Covid War Room (CWR) was established in response to an avalanche of important aid calls for Covid patients during the second wave in April-May.
The team of alumni and students of the International Institute of Information Technology-Hyderabad (IIIT-H) has so far resolved 1,107 requests and processed more than Rs 40 lakh in financial aid.
The founder of CWR, Sriharsha Karamchati, has created a technical ecosystem of support through a volunteer army and crowd data and funding. “Our basic goal is to take the mental burden off the patient’s patient and give him / her precious time with the patient, while remotely providing assistance and handling until the problem is resolved,” he said.
The CWR processes the requests for hospital beds, ventilators and oxygen support devices, medicine or blood, confirmed through the extensive database of resources and their availability. The verified information is then passed on to the assistant for immediate action.
‘We take the request, calm the servant down and ask them to spend time with the patient. “After receiving the request, we verify the details, adjust the bed, ambulance or oxygen and organize our funding if the person is unable to pay, according to need,” Sriharsha explained.
IIITH’s alumni, IT whiz kids, working professionals, founding members and university students came together to work as a team. The group also has doctors, IIITH engineers, parents who are chief executives, NGO chiefs, hospital owners and IAS officers.
The backend processes were conceptualized and designed by core team member Mohit Jain, IIITH alumni, and Sudhir Yarram, a Ph.D. scholar working in the computer vision space. “We used a Ziffy platform to set up the helpline,” said Microsoft’s IIITH alumni Anupriya Inumella, who set up the call center to process requests from across the country.
Sriharsha Karamchati, co-founder of startup Questbook, has a website called Covid.questbook.app that offered creative services in exchange for monetary donations for any Covid cause. He offered to make an advertisement for a business if it donated Rs 50,000 for any amount Covid cause. To date, it has been able to make donations worth Rs 60 lakh possible.
Through his Twitter Instagram posts, Sriharsha mobilized Rs.6 lakh for a daughter who lost her mother Covid and had to raise 1.5 lakhs a day for her critically ill father. ‘Donate 350 rupees you would spend on a Swiggy meal’, was a touching message from Insta.
He then reached out to his closest friends and posted his request for volunteers to join him on the IIITH Life Facebook page. The next day he had 250 volunteers from IIITH students and alumni. They transformed the forum into a high-tech platform overnight, creating slack groups, building slack bots, and automating various processes.
The core of ten members consists of Goodclap, the fundraising company that was one of the first members of the CWR team. Resource verification is undertaken by volunteer parents, 40+ age group members who bring together their proven human skills to create connections with trusted resources in different domains.
The team has created a Data Studio where people can see where the funds are going. “We donated Rs 5.5 lakh for the erection of 45 oxygen beds and 15 ICU beds in Kukatpally,” said Anupriya Inumella. In Agra, 350 ration packets were distributed among the rickshawallah families who lost their main breadwinner. The CWR raised Rs 60 lakh and bought 20 oxygen concentrators from Australia, which are now being hired as a free service.
The call center processed patient requests from cities like Ajmer, Bhopal, Delhi, Rajasthan, Bangalore, Hyderabad and districts in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. “We had 2,000 requests, of which 1,700 were processed with a success rate of 60 percent,” Anupriya said.
Anyone who needs help can contact the Covid War Helpline 6304296587 or DM their CovidInstagram-related requests handle https://www.instagram.com/sriharshakaramchati/ or tag the Twitter handle https://twitter.com/HarshaKaramchat
Source: The Siasat Daily