This 20-year-old student has built an application that tells you how clean your locality is

Inspired by the Prime Minister’s campaign of Swacch Bharat, Sourav Badami, a 20-year-old computer science student from Jamshedpur, Jharkhand, has come up with My Clean India, a web-based application that tracks and reports the cleanliness level in the country.

The application was launched with the sole aim of keeping India clean and to support and promote the Swachh Bharat campaign.

On a mission to clean India

Deeply concerned by the state of cleanliness in the country, Sourav, a student of Haldia Institute of Technology, Haldia, decided to act on it, and was intent on coming up with a solution that would help tackle the situation. On a mission to clean the streets, roads and infrastructure of the country, Sourav started toying with the idea of an application that would help people in the process. In the digital age that we live in today, this seemed like the right direction, and he started working on the application in November 2016.

Talking about what drove him to come up with this application, Sourav says,

“I have been seriously watching the places around me for a while. I noticed that not everyone is careless about our surroundings’ hygiene; there are people who do care. Until now, we didn’t have any medium to know about the state of hygiene of any place in the country. So, I designed a mock that could help an individual with a report, as well as help organisations keep track of the place that they need to take care of.”

How the application works

The application is a medium application, says Sourav, meaning that it serves as a medium for carrying out tasks. Speaking further on it, he says, “How I look at it is that the application collects data and presents it to people who care about it enough to use it efficiently.”

Talking about the challenges that he faced when the idea of the application came into being, Sourav says that one of the major questions was on the practicality of the idea and whether it would be used by people. He says, “I discussed the idea with a few of my professors at college and they all gave a positive response. So cheers! I went ahead with it.

“The next challenge was in terms of users. As of now, there’s no major success in terms of audience; we have received minor traffic and some sessions so far.”

Talking about the functionality of the application, Sourav says that one can simply download the application and add a status marker on the map after selecting any particular location. The status markers are broadly classified as clean, severe or in-progress.

The application is an open source and can be used for free. As of now, it can be used hassle-free on desktop computers over a web browser to add a status marker on the map of India and see some all-time reports.

Talking further on the development of the application, Sourav says that the core of the application is written in Python and Django framework, and that the entire frontend is based on JavaScript and some third party libraries. He adds,

“It is hosted on a cloud server provided by Heroku, which has some limitations, but it’s enough to get a good amount of traffic initially. In terms of functionality, we assume it has been going well. We released the first version of the application, and a lot of new features are about to be rolled out in our next release.”

Impact and future plans

Talking about the implementation and the working of the application, Sourav says that data collection on the condition of any area plays a major role in the success of the application. The team is currently approaching agencies and NGOs that can collect and cure data on the cleanliness of areas.

On asking how the application will help in keeping an area clean by reporting statuses over a map, Sourav says,

“The data received by people like you and me can be used to generate some statistics, which can in turn be used by the municipalities and other such organisations to tackle the situation more efficiently.”

Sourav hopes that the impact will be wide-ranging if the application is used efficiently, and that it will be a great problem solver.

The team is planning to work on changes that will further help with the reporting status of areas with a transient nature of cleanliness. Sourav and his team are currently working on various parameters for reporting varying kinds of conditions.

Also, the application, which is currently a web-based one, will soon be launched on Android as well.