WOMEN SPECIAL... APPS

 Techies Step in to Arm Women with Apps 

Come up with a slew of mobile applications in the aftermath of the Delhi gang-rape to give women instant access to help in times of need

‘While travelling in a lonely street, have you ever felt insecure and wished for a superhero to protect you?’ asks the demo video for Sentinel, a smartphone application meant as a virtual security assistant for women. The video shows a menacing figure stalking a lone girl walking down a deserted street. She presses a button on her phone and the next minute a police van appears and the potential attacker is apprehended, thanks to Sentinel.

The application, developed by two friends from Kerala, is one of the several technology-inspired solutions that have been created to make Indian cities safer in the weeks after the gangrape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in Delhi. From Kochi to boardrooms in Mumbai and across Delhi, tech-savvy India is responding with innovative mobile apps and websites that leverage the power of crowd-sourcing to alert people to unsafe locations. The mobile apps — Sentinel, Fightback from Mahindra Group firm CanvasM and ICE from the Mumbai Police and KPMG — use global positioning systems in mobile phones to track the location of the person in distress. These apps require only a single touch of a button to send out an alert, unlike phone calls for which a person in trouble may not have the time or the presence of mind.

“Such initiatives that use technology, while also involving the public, will help the police in detecting and reporting crime,” said Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh.

“It can also help in reducing the response time when an incident occurs. Technology can not only help in detection and reporting but also in prevention.” ICE, developed by KPMG, is available for free download from the Mumbai police web site. Hitting the button sends out a distress alert, which includes a 30-second alarm and an SMS containing details of the location. The coordinates help save valuable time wasted tracing the location of the person, which would've been the case with calls made to number 100.

Fightback, developed by Mahindra Group firm CanvasM, goes a step further and integrates it to Facebook. So when a user sends out an alert her Facebook status is immediately updated with it. When the Facebook message or hyperlink in the SMS is clicked it shows the location of the alert on Google Maps with the time of the alert. Fightback was initially a paid app, available for download for . 100. But following the Delhi incident, the group decided to make it free. “The app works only on smartphones now. But the next version will also work on basic phones,” said Jagdish Mitra, the CEO of CanvasM.

For Christin Emmaneul George, 25, and Kallidil Kalidasan, 23, cofounders of Mindhelix Technosol, tinkering with technology and building citizen-centric apps was a hobby. They first built TukTuk Meter, a mobile app which calculates the auto fare. Its runaway success — 30,000 downloads a month, said Kalidasan — saw them make the second one, Sentinel, provoked by similar incidents in Delhi a year ago. Sentinel can not only send out SMS and e-mail alerts with the location coordinates but also a phone call alert. It also translates the location coordinates to an address that a lay person can immediately identify, such as, ‘Kalpana sent an alert from Shop 20 at 8 pm. After the December 16 gangrape incident, they decided to make the app more robust. The enhanced version allows alerts to be sent to five people instead of two even if the phone has been switched off or if there is no signal.

“We triangulate the position of the user from the mobile towers,” said Kalidasan, COO, Mindhelix. The new version of app will soon be available for the Blackberry, iOS and Windows platforms.’ So far, none of the apps directly alert the police, although both Mitra of CanvasM and George of Mindhelix said they were in discussions with the police in Delhi and in other states. “We are discussing that option with KPMG,” police commissioner Singh said. Since the ICE app sends out SMS alerts, landline phones are not equipped to handle it, pointed out Mukund Pawar, inspector of police heading the cybercrime cell in Mumbai.

For Saloni Malhotra and her three cofounders of safecity.in, safety went beyond what the police could provide. In five days, the four founders — two from Delhi and two from Mumbai — had created safecity.in, a project based on the Web 2.0 philosophy of people's contribution, up and running. An information aggregation platform, safecity.in helps to identify unsafe locations across the country through voluntary reporting of incidents of abuse by people. The abuse is also categorised into various levels such as cat calls, groping and assault.

“So far, 94 incidents have been reported,” said Malhotra, who is also working on extending the initiative from the virtual to the real world and integrating the website with mobile apps. “This will be the destination for anything to do with safety,” she said. And contrary to popular perception, Malhotra says there have been no hoaxes or prank attempts. An indication of how seriously citizens are taking the issue of women’s safety.
N SHIVAPRIYA MUMBAI  ET130109