JOIN USNeed help? Contact your neighbour on this app
To connect citizens to their respective localities and help build close-knit neighbourhoods, two IIT graduates living in Bengaluru have developed a mobile application called ‘Hey Neighbor’.
From helping locate waste management service to emergency blood donors, car-pooling service providers to hospitals, the app does everything to solve the local problems of the citizens. The idea to start the technology struck the developers when the son of one of them, Gaurav Srivastava, took ill.
Srivastava recounted his struggle to find a 24-hour medical store. “My family and I had moved to Marathahalli in April this year. My son took ill in the same month and I found it difficult to locate a medical store as I was new to the place. I ended up spending hours to find the shop. It was then that I realised the need for a neighbourhood network. I discussed the idea with my friend, Aravind R S, who readily agreed with me. It took us a couple of months to develop the app which we launched in the end of August on an experimental basis,” he said.
The developers said that in Murugesh Palya, a locality off Old Airport Road, a community had created a small forum on the app for addressing the garbage problems of their locality and possible solutions to them.
Similarly, during the Bangalore shutdown in September, users offered car-pooling in the day to anyone stuck at home, and one of the citizens in need of an urgent blood donor received guidance through the app, they said.
The app currently runs on Android and has a network of more than 10,000 users in Bengaluru, who help each other in offering solutions and advice. Overwhelmed with the response from the users, Aravind and Srivastava expanded the technology to Pune and Mumbai last month.
The duo, both graduates of Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, said the app worked like WhatsApp in terms of data usage. “We are upgrading it so that it can run even on non-Android phones,” Aravind said.