Raising civic issues with government departments and getting them resolved has been perceived as a cumbersome process by the public, but the students of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi might have a solution to this.
A group of M.Tech students of IIIT-D has developed a mobile application that would help general public to file complaints on public grievances on a simple, short and interactive interface.
The app named NoWhinge avoids the confusion of how and to which department one should raise the grievance.
"One can simply register one's complaint, the content of which would then be analysed by the software and forwarded to the concerned department," Aakash Deep, a member of the team said.
Besides Deep, the other team members are Ishbir Walia, Karan Dabas, Manshul V Belani and Raunak Sinha.
"Coming from a technical background, we thought there should be an easy-to-use app to speed up the complaint process. The app also comes with a tracking option so that one can see how and when are the authorities reacting to the complaint," Deep said.
NoWhinge also provides the option of re-submitting a complaint in case of recurring problems or non-responsiveness of authorities towards a complaint.
"The app also provides a locality analysis feature which can be used to investigate the types of problems faced by the people in that locality and the response time of various authorities that handle the civic amenities in that area," he added.
Focusing on a human-centred designing process, the team built the app after interviewing several users multiple times to ascertain its feasibility and to get feedback on the interface and its functionalities. The team also has plans to link social media to the problems to bring more attention to them.
With the app currently in its testing phase, the team hopes to get support from various government agencies going forward.
"As of now we have concentrated on the development of the public usage aspect of the application. We require support from various government agencies that handle public grievances to help us in understanding their expectations from such a system and also collaborate with us to provide a hassle free experience to the end user," Deep said.