The students have already tested the Garbage Locator Application for 10 days in the neighbourhood of their college along with BMC officials from K-west ward.
Five students from DJ Sanghvi College of Engineering (DJSCE) in Vile Parle have developed a smartphone-based application, which will help citizens in not only alerting the BMC about uncleared garbage dumps by clicking a picture and giving its exact location, but also help it to respond to the complainant after clearing it.
The students have already tested the Garbage Locator Application for 10 days in the neighbourhood of their college along with BMC officials from K-west ward. Additional municipal commissioner (city) Dr Pallavi Darade will be launching the app on Wednesday. It has also been decided to use the app on a pilot basis in the entire K-west ward from first week of April.
It was during a college committee meeting that Aditya Bhatt, Shantanu Ugemuge, Harsh Parmar, Anmol Sheth and Atharva Naik, all third-year computer engineering students at the DJSCE, decided to do this. "Our principal has been regularly talking about the Swacch Bharat campaign passionately, which inspired us to work on this; that meeting set the ball rolling last December. We visited BMC's solid waste management office in Worli, spoke with several officials and decided to make an app that would help the citizens as well as the BMC," said Sheth.
Explaining the working, Ugemuge said the basic principle of the app was that any citizen could click a picture of an uncleared garbage dump along with a geotag of the location and upload it on the BMC servers.
"It works with the help of Google Maps, so if anyone sees a large heap of garbage anywhere, all they need to do is go to this app (it has to be downloaded and registered on the smartphone), with the help of GPS mark the location where the garbage is and take a picture and upload it. The location will soon be tagged red," said Ugemuge, adding that the BMC staff will immediately get the details, and once they clear the dump, they can also upload a picture post the clean-up, which the complainant will be able to see.
Darade said this was a good tool to monitor garbage clearance and would help the BMC and citizens work together. "We have decided to study the results of the pilot project, based on which future implementation will be decided," she said.
Praising the students' work, she added that this will encourage more youngsters who are good with technology to come up with solutions for the city and the BMC.
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