The residents of Manarcaud in Kottayam can now take care of their routine household services with the touch of a finger. For this, all they need is a smartphone equipped with the ‘Thozhilidam App’.
The National Service Scheme unit at the St.Mary’s college, Manarcaud has developed a real-time instant app to supply labour and service on demand. The free mobile app being developed with a technical support of a Kochi-cased IT firm, covers about 30 services as different as from rubber tapping to carpentry, painting and even palliative care services.
To begin with, the app has listed the details of about 400 skilled workers, as identified by the NSS volunteers of the college, for the customers to sift through and choose. Each worker joining the app will have to undergo background and reference checks and sign an MOU, to make sure that they live up to the objective of offering credible service with out rip-offs.
Plans are also afoot to give a fundamental behavioural training to the labourers registering with the app to ensure a smooth delivery of services.
The idea of the mobile app, according to Tony Francis, NSS programme officer, follows the huge demand for skilled workers and the thought for leveraging technological advancement to the benefit of the unorganised labourers. Considering the reach of smartphones among all sections of the society, they finally zeroed in on an app-based solution to streamline the unregulated sector, which typically do not have employment contracts or structured methods of finding employment.
“The app has two main components- customer and worker. While the client can select the labourer based on GPS location and rating of employees, a message is sent to the person concerned, who may respond to it based on availability, ” he explained.
Scale up
In addition to expanding the list of services it offers, the app also looks to scale up and expand its customer base. Its creators are now in consultations with the MGU, which has evinced interest in expanding the scope of the project to a vast area including the Kottayam Town.
A trial version of the app is already available in Google play store.
