Srinagar, August 04: Haider Tanvir Shawl, a Class 12th student of Delhi Public School Srinagar has been busy all through these months on keeping the local people updated on COVID19 statistics, virus hotspots, red zones & other virus clusters. Haider runs this initiative via the website he has developed, alongwith dedicated social media handles. The website can be reached at www.covid19kashmir.org and is optimised to run on 2G network as well. Apart from showing daily COVID19 statistics, the website also displays spread trends on daily & cummulative basis. The website keeps a trail of different developments and active cases, deaths and recoveries of COVID patients in J&K.
“The data & codebase for the website is taken from crowd-sourced initiative COVID19INDIA. I am hosting it in cloud for maximum availability”, says Haider.
Haider has also created an account on the fundraising website Milaap, wherein he raises donations for COVID19 affected persons and families.
Talking about the donation platform, Haider explains, “The Covid-19 outbreak and subsequent quarantine of communities has caused many households to lose their livelihood and income. Many families are having a hard time making ends meet. The aim of covid19kashmir campaign is to raise funds to provide food supplies for the financially vulnerable families in Kashmir. The donated money is forwarded to Athrout, one of the most trusted and reputed NGOs in Kashmir, which has the resources and setup to procure the food supply and distribute it among the needful.”
Apart from raising money for COVID19 cause, Haider also uses the power of social media to reach out to people and promote the initiatives taken by various NGOs in Kashmir.
Asked about the idea behind this initiative, he says, “Sometime around April, I started seeing plenty of posts in my social media feed of people asking for donations and food supply. Naturally I felt sad. I realised that I had plenty of free time and maybe I could do something about it. After a few days of thinking, the idea of starting a fundraising campaign came to my mind. I spent the next few weeks creating a website, a fundraising account and social media handles for the campaign.”
With plasma therapy being one of the possible treatments for COVID recovery, Haider is also running a dedicated crowd-sourced Plasma Donation campaign to map plasma donors with COVID patients who are in need.
The initiative runs a dedicated & very active handle @covid19kashmir_ on Twitter, a social media platform.
In addition to this initiative, Haider has also developed 02 apps and a game. “My tuition class’s schedule is available on their website. But it is very messy and takes a lot of time to load. I created a web crawler which gets the data quick and presents it in a pretty way. I and my friends use it all the time”, says Haider.
Haider started coding in Class 6th when he was introduced to HTML by his subject teacher in DPS Srinagar. “I truly realised my passion for technology when I was in sixth grade. That was the class in which I was introduced to the technology of HTML in my computer class. I was instantly mesmerised by the power of it. I just had to create a text file and write a few lines of HTML markup and voila!”, he mentions.
“I joined the IT club in my school and the Atal Tinkering Lab which further expanded my knowledge and experiences. It has been a wonderful journey and I am very thankful to my school for providing me with these amazing opportunities to learn and experience new things”, says Haider while giving credit to his school.
