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After many false starts, 23-year-old Isha Bansal finally found an oxygen cylinder kit and antiviral injections for her 31-year-old cousin, who is in the hospital with a cobido.
Bansal lives with 14 other relatives in Delhi, and began experiencing hidden symptoms two weeks ago. When he was isolated on his own, all members of his family soon began to show signs of infection. As the situation worsened, he knew he had to start looking for oxygen cylinders and other resources, but he didn’t know where to go. Everything he found on Google or WhatsApp was the wrong number or supplies were sold out.
Bansal’s friends came in. They searched Twitter and Instagram, found providers, and started calling one after another. After a hundred calls, a lead was carried out, and Bansal, who was recovering from the convoy, took the oxygen kit. He paid the original price 12 times. After that, he paid nearly $ 1,200 on the black market for antiviral drugs.
“Man is not that people are doing business,” he says.
He also said it was essential to find a group of family and friends: “If I had called them alone, I would have been emptied, but since my friends were helping me, one of the numbers worked. Otherwise, it takes a lot of time and is frustrating.”
Limitations of crowdsourcing
While volunteers circulate information on social media, others have helped. Umang Galaiya, a 25-year-old software engineer, built the website covid19-twitter.in, began as a place for people to search for specific resources in the city and over time began to add keywords: beds, oxygen, remdesivir, FabiFlu. More than 200,000 people have visited this website in less than a week.
“While websites like Instagram and Twitter have helped create a network that allows many people to find and share information, they are marginalized and elite.”
Twitter, for its part, list of resources shared by verified users.
But online crowdsourcing doesn’t help everyone who needs it. India has a little 2 million Twitter users and about 28 million Instagram users, is almost a part of it 700 million Internet users in the country – which is only half of the population of 1.368 billion. There are many people Those who don’t know what Twitter is, or how to use. As the shield surpasses the country’s rural areas – almost half of a village in southern India tested it positive, reports suggest that people are proposing different ways to overcome the digital divide. Padmini Ray Murray, founder of technology design company Design Beku, says, “Although websites like Instagram and Twitter have helped create a network that allows many people to find and share information, they are exclusionary and elite. The majority of India’s population defends itself.”
Murray woke up one morning last week and decided to design a website, oxygenblr.in, for Bangalore English and its native language, Kannada speakers. The site includes phone numbers for ambulances and information on oxygen and bed availability, home care, blood donation, and more. He says, “I felt the need to rescue all this content from these [social media] platforms and then put people in a static space that they could access. ”
The role of government
As small-scale digital efforts move forward, greater partnerships have begun to emerge: support is on the way from India’s technology sector, as investors and startups charter flights oxygen cylinders and concentrators. Many have also come together raise About $ 10 million for oxygen, vaccines and home care, while others are up and running campaigns to raise funds for the cryptocurrency.
While citizens are working to find their own solutions, experts have criticized the government’s approach. For example, Prime Minister Narendra Modi pointed out how the cases went on television that the cases were out of control and, instead of commenting on the real scope of the crisis, simply he asked Let the Indians be more careful. It also has the political side of Modi he said Free vaccines in a state on Twitter would depend on an election victory.
It happens when the government approves massive public meetings and requests only a portion of the vaccines needed to meet inoculation targets, even though India is one of the largest vaccine producers in the world. Country in February gift More than 3 million vaccine doses to neighboring countries in Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives, but it was later criticized for not giving priority to its citizens.
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