Giving a fillip to the “Vocal for local” campaign, three young innovators have launched Soch Swadeshi, an add-on/plug-in feature for Google Chrome browser, that helps buyers using Amazon e-commerce website to make an informed purchase of Indian products.
A buyer has to first type http://get.sochswadeshi.in/install to activate this add-on feature on his Google Chrome browser. When the user logs on to the Amazon website on his laptop or desktop and selects a product, Soch Swadeshi gets activated and comes up with flags such as “Product of Bharat, Manufactured in Bharat”, “Product of Bharat, Sourced in Bharat”, “Product of Japan, Assembled in Bharat” or “Product of USA, Manufactured in Bharat”.
These flags were the outcome of data gathered by the group about the parent companies of products, as to where they were sourced from and where they were manufactured. A buyer could also tweet about the products with the hashtag #vocalforlocal, after a purchase.
According to Swastik Padma from Puttur, who is a member of the group, told The Hindu , not all products have information about where they were sourced from and manufactured. The group was doing a detailed study of brands through crowd sourcing and machine learning not only to inform about the place of manufacture and source but also to tell where the parent companies were based. At present, information on 300 brands was available and more brands would be added, he said.
Mr. Padma, a first year BE student from Vivekananda Engineering College, Puttur, has developed this feature along with C.S. Mohammed Suhail, a researcher from Srirangapatna, and Pranav Shikarpur, who is doing his engineering course in the U.S.
The three were members of the Indian Team that excelled in the International Science and Engineering Fair held at Pittsburgh in the U.S. in May 2018. They were part of the two Indian teams that won the second place grand awards of $ 1,500 each. MIT Lincoln Laboratory has named three minor planets after them.
Their discussion on an App to promote Indian products culminated in the add-on. Mr. Padma said, “We started this work on July 3 and launched it on Sunday (July 12) following clearance by Google.” Besides working on expanding the feature to other e-commerce platforms, the group has plans to design an App for use in smartphones too.
