When the pizza arrived, 14-year-old Neha Dashrath was ecstatic for the first time she placed an order from a takeaway app.
She said: "When my friends discuss ordering food from the app, I'm always curious and shy. But now I can show off to them."
(Source: Shoma Abhyankar)
Dashras, like about 5400 other Indians, lives in a slum area in Pune city, in Maharashtra. Broken bricks and old tiles and tin-skin shacks squeeze out the curved alley, which is only wide enough to accommodate one person walking.
According to the 2011 census, there are 108,000 slums in India, with 65 million civilians living there. According to the United Nations estimates in 2014, the number of urban residents in India will increase more than any other country by 2050, yet its slums will grow faster than cities.
Until not long ago, Dashras shared the same address with everyone around her—that is, the slum itself. A big banyan tree is used as a concentration for emails and other packages.
Because it does not have its own address, it is difficult for residents to open bank and postal accounts, or receive electricity and water bills. During the COVID-19 pandemic, medical teams once had difficulty tracking infected residents.
Figure | Local resident Shobana Shiekh showed a Google address code for her door (Source: Shoma Abhyankar)
Last September, a nonprofit called the "Sheat Association" jointly launched a pilot project with Google and UNICEF : providing unique digital addresses for houses in the Laximinagar region.
Now, Dashras has a special code that she can enter in the delivery app or share with friends to guide them how to get to her home.
"It is the pandemic that has driven this plan," said Pratima Joshi, an architect and co-founded the nonprofit. She has worked closely with the slums in Korhapur and Tana since 1993.
The number address received by residents is "plus code", which is a free feature developed by Google that is built from open source software. The plus sign encoding is a combination of simple letters and numbers derived from latitude and longitude.
Each encoding consists of four characters, a plus sign and another two to four characters. The characters following the plus sign define the size of the area.
For example, GRQH+H4 points to a popular temple in Pune , while FRV5+2W56 is the code for a community public toilet in Laximinagar region.
These encodings can be found on Google Maps and can be used anywhere in the world over the Internet.
Although people with entity addresses can use these services, it will take some time to convince people to register.
Many people have never heard of Google Maps and are skeptical of Josh's nonprofit staff, mistakenly thinking they are officials of the Indian Slum Renovation Authority. So, the nonprofit recruits local students to introduce the project to people from door to door.
More than a thousand families in the slums, drainage rooms, community public toilets, rescue centers and drinking water cans now have "plus codes".
Each house involved in this project has an entity blue address board that displays its encoding for everyone to see.
"This saved me a lot of time," said Suresh Defram Dalmawat, who used to have to close his grocery store when he went to the wholesale market.Nowadays, by using the plus number, a lot of what he needs can be delivered to his door.
So far, Josh's organization has helped over 9000 families in Pune, Thana and Korhapur get numerical addresses, with the goal of covering another 58 ghettos.
She hopes that eventually residents will be able to add their address code to India's digital identity authentication system "Aadhaar".
similar projects are also carried out elsewhere: a nonprofit called "Addressed Unaddressed Land" uses plus-code to connect slum residents in Kolkata with banks and post offices; the "Rural Utah " project in the United States provides numerical addresses for Navajo residents to register ; the International Rescue Committee uses plus-codes in Immunization and Family Planning projects.
Many services have not yet accepted plus-signal codes, and it will take some time to get companies and government agencies to use them. However, for now, just one address seems to have made some people's lives more convenient.
Support: Wang Beibei
Original text:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/04/28/1022940/slum-dwellers-india-google-plus-code-access-delivery-apps/
