Helping Kashmir breathe again

When the father of one of their colleagues tested positive for Covid, 25-year-old Srinagar-based IT professional Yafer Nazir and his team felt prompted to do their bit for society, and they did it.
On his discharge, the doctors asked the family of the ailing person to arrange an oxygen concentrator for him, which was very difficult and time-consuming for family to arrange. Moved by their colleague’s plight, this team of youngsters not only arranged the resource but soon came up with an online platform- KashmirO2 to help others in such a situation.
“In this time of the pandemic, despite relentless efforts by our doctors, organisations, individuals and government departments it has been difficult for people to have easy access to critical medical equipment. To tackle the growing crisis we’ve come up with a simple platform, KashmirO2”, says Yafer.
As per Yafer, KashmirO2 is an initiative to “assist people in this crisis situation and help Kashmir breathe again”.
“We have created a digital directory for the medical oxygen suppliers, so those in need waste none of their crucial time and reach the suppliers,” says Yafer.
Another Srinagar-based techie Haider Ali Punjabi and his friends have set up an online platform- “resources.covidkashmir.org” which provides vital information on Covid-19. Punjabi has the support of two more youngsters Mudasir Ali and Vikas Bukhari for the platform that provides helplines and a database of doctors and healthcare facilities. Punjabi says this initiative is a part of a larger CovidKashmir.org project, which has been maintaining data related to Covid in Jammu and Kashmir.
“Our platform is providing vital contact details on medical oxygen dealers in order to save precious lives. The database also provides contacts of resources such as NGOs that offer delivery of essentials such as medicines and food to those in distress” says Punjabi.
While Punjabi and his team often disseminate information on Covid provided by healthcare experts on their social media handles, Yafer and his team also plan to add more essential sections to their initiative in the near future. “Some of these include on-call doctors, blood, plasma donors and ambulances. While resistance to change is true everywhere we are optimistic about the initiative being helpful to the people in need post-pandemic as well” says Yafer.
Punjabi says their platform has a feature of “Tweet SoS” which helps to open the interface of Twitter and provides access to Twitter handles of all independent volunteers who are helping for Covid-related work in the Valley. “There are hundreds of volunteers working to provide valid needs for oxygen and oxygen concentrators to the needy. What our Tweet SoS does is that it connects people to the volunteers on Twitter” says Punjabi.
KashmirO2 has also started creating a community via social media and public relations to help everybody in need. “We ought to bridge the gap between the patient and the supplier using in-community supplier directory and fast SOS management systems. As soon as someone lands on KashmirO2.com, they have an option to either look for oxygen cylinders or concentrators, choose their district and get a list of suppliers in the district. If they are not able to find a match, they can raise an SOS on the website. As soon as we receive an SOS, we verify the details and amplify it on our social media channels, Covid Resource groups, Volunteers group. The idea again is for the help to reach the people in need and not vice-versa” says the KashmirO2 team members.
Going a step ahead, Haider Ali Punjabi says the platform- resources.covidkashmir.org- also works in an offline mode so that “for a user who has a slow internet connection or no web access at all, the website will work normally if it has been accessed before”.
Explaining the foundation of their initiative, Yafer says his team was aware that there were volunteers, NGOs, organisations over-burdened with requests for oxygen and oxygen concentrators. “We just offered a platform to re-arrange and re-organise these individual group contacts, spreadsheets, WhatsApp forwards, etc. This laid the basic foundation of KashmirO2. The data, details, resources were already out there, we just had to organise it for the masses to have an easy access to. A simple Web App, that connects suppliers/donors, to the people in need,” says Yafer.
He says as of now his team has started with oxygen resources (concentrator, cylinder). “Suppliers are able to list the resources and update them with a single tap using a mobile app, while those in need can reach the supplier in literally 4 taps on the KashmirO2 website. Suppliers can list resources as free, on-rent, or on-sale,” says Yafer. He says the KashmirO2 team includes Hanan and Cirhan for system and application development, Sauliha and Mudasir for management and content, Hayat and Fahad for supplier on-boarding and Hashim for social media and public relations.
“Coming from a tech-management background I handpicked a team to build and manage this initiative. We have put the best of our resources into its making and management, and promise to make it better. This being a community-based solution, support from the community becomes critical. I would request all the NGOs, Volunteer Groups, to sign up, and make the essentials accessible” says Yafer.
While the platform resources.covidkashmir.org is offering help by providing information on suppliers of oxygen life-saving drugs and food items, Punjabi says the inputs provided by healthcare experts is being presented in a graphical form “so that users on social media get fully benefitted”.
“The second wave of Covid has been quite severe and we lost so many of our near and dear ones. Some lives were lost because many couldn’t get access to life-saving drugs on time. Our user-friendly online platform offers a search option which makes finding help just a click away” says Punjabi.
Yafer says his team has been taking oxygen suppliers onboard, receiving SOS on a daily basis and trying to be “as prompt as possible”. “Our response time is generally under 2 minutes,” says Yafer.
For this KashmirO2 team, the first priority as a directory-based platform is taking more and more suppliers onboard their platform. The main challenge as per the team was not only reaching out to oxygen suppliers but also making them understand the application. “The suppliers are a backbone to this initiative as they would ensure real-time availability feature is on point. We won’t say we are 100% real-time, however, we are constantly striving to keep the data as latest as possible. We are using phone calls, Whatsapp groups and social media to reach every possible supplier and even guide them through the process of Sign Up. For those who are not able to sign up, we make a manual listing after verifying the details,” say the team members.
These young working professionals say the idea from the very beginning was to make it very quick and easy for the users which include the Oxygen suppliers as well as people who are in need of supplies. “At KashmirO2 we never wanted to add overhead to users, thus the entire experience and development was done accordingly. During the development, the scalability of the system of course was on priority. Tomorrow we can be listing a lot more essential than we are listing currently,” say the team members.

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