Citizens across India come together to propose an urgent solution, ‘COVIDCitizens’, to help Indians fight COVID-19
The platform provides quick and easy access to relevant Covid-related resources from more than 25,000 providers in 200 cities in India and is verified by more than 500 civilian volunteers, as well as verified by thousands of people searching for potential clients through the platform itself.
New Delhi, May 10, 2021 – With endless clues circulating on WhatsApp and Twitter, it has become a stressful situation for citizens who need to find what they are looking for, on time. If we can save time wasted in the frantic search for validated information and verified leads, we can save lives.
It is with this goal that COVIDCitizens, a community initiative, has collaborated to provide relevant and reliable information, which can be accessed in a minute. You can easily search “by location” directly on the website with GPS. We also have a friendly bot, Introbot, that you can chat with, which will fetch resources from our database and bring you information at your fingertips. You can also log in to our live audio platform, Fireside, where more than 250 volunteers support you in local languages, making it easy for those who are tech-savvy but need help.
The initiative which has already helped over 5,00,000 covid-affected families, is led by Jasminder Singh Gulati, Co-Founder & CEO, NowFloats (acquired by Reliance Jio) as well as Avinash Raghava, Founding Volunteer at SaaSBOOMI, who have brought together Introbot and Fireside, along with a tribe of 500+ dedicated volunteers to deliver this full-stack solution.
Speaking about the initiative – Aditya Kothari, Co-Founder, Fireside comments, “There’s strength in unity, and we need to be united in our efforts now more than ever. We at #fireside are proud to collaborate and join efforts to form the @covidcitzens platform to offer 24×7 assistance to distressed citizens. Voicing out your distress and seeking help is very important. With trained volunteers and counseling experts in every city helpline room, citizens can step into these virtual rooms, ask their query – related to the hospital bed, oxygen, plasma, and everything covid-related, and also access free mental health support/therapy with a real human on the other side of the mic.”
Sharing about their full-stack solution Utkarsh Roy and Divyaansh Anuj, Co-Founders of Introbot said, “It’s an honour to be able to directly impact so many lives in such a time of crisis. We have already helped over 5,00,000 covid-affected families and our mission is #SavingAMillionLives. Through Introbot, our Whatsapp bot we provide instant, real-time information on medical resources, by accessing 25,000 suppliers and resources, spanning 200+ cities in the country. We believe it’s not just information that we provide, but also hope to the affected families in these times of distress”
Garima Gupta, Head of Data Science at Aon in San Francisco, California, while looking for leads for her family in India mentioned in a post on LinkedIn, “Salute to the Introbot team for building a unified database of verified vendors providing Oxygen, Hospital Beds, and other scarce resources across India in this crisis! Have personally tried the WhatsApp-based bot a few times and it is just brilliant at providing real-time verified leads!”
About COVIDCitizens: We are a group of committed Indians who have come together to help alleviate the current critical situation in India. We are working to create, select and provide quick and easy access to one of India’s largest databases of verified Covid related resources. We are not affiliated with the government and we can do our best with the resources we have.
We can be reached at covidcitizensindia@gmail.com and https://covidcitizens.org/
