In a bid to provide a well-coordinated relief aid operation in the disaster-stricken areas of Uttarakhand, start-ups from Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai have come together in an initiative called ‘Rebuild Uttarakhand’.
In a bid to provide a well-coordinated relief aid operation in the disaster-stricken areas of Uttarakhand, start-ups from Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai have come together in an initiative called ‘Rebuild Uttarakhand’.
Initiated by a few startups coming together, Rebuild Uttarakhand is looking to keep the current momentum going and take more steps to help the state.
Mandeep Dhillon, a professional mountaineer and founder of a Delhi based tourism start-up Synapses set up a base camp in Uttarakhand along with his friends to help with relief and rehabilitation camps in the state in June. This is where he met Rajesh Mane at a 'Weekend Ventures’ event in August and came up with the idea.
With the help of Anand Satyan from the start-up DeliverWithme, the two set up a website and started a campaign which invites contributions from start-ups, individuals and anyone else who’s looking to help.
The three city 'Reload - Hack for Uttarakhand' - a 12 hrs multi-city hackathon organised to encourage development of mobile and web applications to facilitate relief and rehabilitation camps in Uttarakhand - saw a variety of interesting apps being developed for the disaster prone areas.
One of the interesting applications developed is a face detection and recognition app to recognize faces in the photos returned by drones.
The startups which are currently involved in this movement are Deliver with me, a crowdsourced delivery start-up; Help India 2013 which has engaged 20+ mountaineers to transport ration in 100+ villages destroyed in areas of Uttarkashi; Social Drones and Airpix, drone start-ups from Mumbai which have engaged their drones, for aerial surveillance, navigation in Uttarkashi areas; Weekend Ventures which has recently conducted hackathons across Mumbai, Bangalore and Delhi; Media venture – 48 hours film project providing media content, animation for spreading awareness; Aeolis, a weather forecasting venture from Netherlands providing real time satellite support.
Also a rural development NGO – Anhad Sewa Trust is providing fund raising support while Silicon Valley based start-up Instamojo is offering their network and payment gateway to make fund raising easier and accessible across social media across countries.
The team is launching a crowdfunding campaign to raise Rs 15 lakh to procure more ration, medical help and constant aerial – drone support.
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