By the time Bodhish Thomas rushed to his flood-ravaged home in Kottayam from Bengaluru, the waters had risen over six feet. Adding to the family’s dismay, their other house in Pandalam in the adjoining Pathanamthitta district too was not spared. Picking up the pieces later, the techie faced several unanswered questions. “Cleaning the houses was arduous enough, but we didn’t have any clue as to what to do with the wells,” recounts the 22-year-old, working as a developer with SV.CO, a digital learning start-up based in Bengaluru.
His friends tried to chip in with information from WhatsApp forwards, but Bodhish was not really convinced. “Most of the information was unreliable. I wanted to find alternatives,” he says. Bodhish then chanced upon an exhaustive Canadian government website detailing dos and don’ts before, during and after a disaster, natural or otherwise. That is when he decided to make use of his métier for a larger cause. “I realised if we could form a platform that aggregates valuable information, in this case, on floods, it could help a lot of people,” he says.
- Afterflood.in features a text-based Facebook chatbot that works using the messenger platform. With ‘prompted’ responses, the chatbot allows for accessing information provided in the website in an interactive way. One can zoom in for tips on three main categories — cleaning, food and water, and safety tips — followed by a slew of sub-categories. Bodhish developed the chatbot with his friend Bobby Isac, who works with the engineering back-end, using the bot platform Chatfuel.
Teaming up with his friends, Ninan A Mathews, Aravind Mahadevan, Sachu Tharian and Neil KC, who mostly helped with collating content, Bodhish soon launched afterflood.in, a crowd-sourced data hub for post-flood-related content focusing on health and well-being. In addition to content in English and Malayalam, the site also hosts a comprehensive ‘flood clean-up guide’, apart from certain handy videos. Some of the key topics covered include illness prevention, water sterilisation, food and paper waste management, fixing water-damaged fridges, cremation of carcasses of animals, and post-traumatic stress issues, to list a few. The website is now listed in keralarescue.in, a digital initiative launched by the Government of Kerala for collaboration and communication between the authorities, volunteers, and the public in the aftermath of the devastating floods.
Bodhish Thomas
Pool of experts
Bodhish says what makes afterflood.in unique is that while the information put out on the site is essentially ‘crowd-sourced’, it is verified by a pool of experts behind the scenes. “The back-end team of verifiers with expertise in their respective fields sifts through the data.” Thus, if aspects related to use of chemicals and cleaning are handled by Dileep P Vangasseri, who has expertise in organic chemistry and chemical biology, Dr Benny Punchakonam, a professor of medicine, looks after posts on medical assistance. The posts also append attribution or sources for the information collated. While some of the common information has been collected from the Canadian website, other sources include Muralee Thummarakudy, Chief of Disaster Risk Reduction in the UN Environment Programme, and instructions shared by government health workers. Visitors have the option of contributing or posting a query by simply dropping a mail to afterflood.in@gmail.com.
As the need for creating such a ‘helpdesk platform’ was immediate, Bodhish says he resorted to GitBook, an open-source tool for developers used for documenting websites. “We used GitBook’s framework and tweaked it to suit our requirements. The advantage was that the site was up in four hours,” he reveals. However, generating reliable, authentic content in line with a Kerala-specific context proved challenging initially. But with over 80,000 visitors so far, Bodhish says the key challenge is to try and reach out to as many as possible, even as thousands still battle with clean-up and restoration processes across the State.
A screenshot of a page in afterflood.in
The need for maintaining utmost authenticity, especially in medical applications, is paramount in such a scenario, and Dr Benny explains how verification of information can help check misinformation that can have hazardous consequences. “Referring to original medical texts is one way. We also check with health workers to understand and place the practices in the local context,” he adds.
With parts of Karnataka also flooded, a Kannada translation of the website has been made available.
“After visiting the site, some students and civilian volunteer organisations have come forward to help the flood-affected,” says Bodhish. The website is mobile-optimised for full-fledged access via smartphones.
Once the need of the hour is past, Bodhish says he hopes to bypass the GitBook format and host the site on a self-supporting, independent platform for faster, larger content access for posterity.
