Your car breaks down and you are in urgent need of a mechanic. Your house needs a fresh coat of paint but you don’t know any painters in your locality. That old piece of furniture cries out for a good carpenter!
Very soon, finding the right persons for all this might just be the tap of a few buttons away.
FindLabour, a mobile app developed by the Department of Vocational Higher Secondary Education, promises to provide a customised, searchable, database of persons across the State practising up to 30 trades. The app, already available in Google Playstore, is being billed as the first-of-its-kind developed by a government department.
What the app does is provide a customer the name, mobile number, the service rendered, and rating of a particular tradesman in a particular locality.
For instance, a person at Statue Junction in Thiruvananthapuram searching for a plumber has only to enter the request on his mobile phone and the app, with the help of GPS technology, would come up with a list of all registered plumbers nearby. The names would be displayed in the descending order of the rating provided by customers.
Already the names of about 50,000 persons practising different trades have been registered in the app. Each VHSE student was asked to register one person. Eventually the department hopes to have at least one lakh persons in their database.
Once a tradesman registers his name and trade on the app, he would also be able to customise when his name and phone number would appear on searches.
For instance, a driver on a trip can choose not to be visible in customer searches during the length of that trip. Also, a tradesman can indicate his specialisation in the app, a mechanic can indicate that he specialises in cars or in two-wheelers.
“Once the database reaches an optimum strength, the pattern of requests made through the app would provide us with an indication of the kind of skilled labour required in different parts of the State. This, in turn can help us in rationalising the vocational courses,” VHSE Director K. P. Naufal told The Hindu .
