Pragati ~ Progress begins at home

Pragati is an online platform that empowers rural housewives to earn money by selling their own authentic self-made products from home & providing reliable services on the go. There are various applications involving e-commerce portals to buy products or exchange old goods for new ones. But, currently, there is no such e-commerce innovation, targeting the backward class, that actually provides a platform to let village-women apply their self-learnt skills to use & start their business. While there are several means and opportunities for urban women to earn, the rural kind is often left to struggle.

Apart from making money, they can access women-centric news, raise questions, doubts and difficulties which otherwise they are not able to clarify, thus paving way to increase intellectual curiosity and self-awareness. Our aim is to expand the reach of rural heritage both locally and amongst the urban too, thus bridging the gap between societies.

Features of the application

The website revolves around enabling women to post specific home-made products they want to sell like pottery, embroidered materials, paintings, knitted clothing, healthy home-made snacks, etc. or even services that they can provide. Clients, based on their nearby locations, can view their uploaded products/services & contact them if they wish to purchase or seek services by registering their interest on the portal.
The Ask Desk section enables women to ask & solve their genuine queries & get advice on social & personal concerns, hence helping them to be future-ready.
We have implemented sentiment analysis to avoid usage of abusive words or spread of hate on the portal.
To stay updated about how women are progressing in different fields, there is a section of news and articles of their latest success stories thus motivating our future entrepreneurs.
To prevent exploitation of users or misuse of the application, there’s an in-built SOS feature to connect helplines in case of emergency.
We have also created a PWA (Progressive Web App) for easy phone accessibility.

An attempt to keep dying Indian artifact culture alive

It is no secret that today some of the most flourishing handicraft and artifact industries once started as small in-house businesses and initiatives taken up by women. But often socially backward women are not given a chance to prove their mettle which leads to the economic downfall as well as heritage loss of the country. As modernisation is transforming the nation, we almost fail to appreciate India’s traditional artifact culture that it was once famous for. Simple and beautiful handmade goods are overlooked and prioritized by imported and branded fancy goods as the country is growing economically. This is an effort from our side to help preserve India’s dying craft culture and uplift the artists who deserve to get much more success and recognition behind the efforts they are putting in the form of their passion and expertise.

Check out Pragati here!

Project Creation

Frontend

Technical Stack Used: HTML, CSS, JAVASCRIPT
Framework Used: Bootstrap
Editor used: VS Code
The Project can be run by opening the the index.html file leading to the home page.

Backend

Technical Stack Used: NodeJS, MongoDB, ExpressJS, JWT
Editor Used: VS Code

Link to frontend repo: https://github.com/TheCodeClutch/HackNagpur-Pragati

3rd Party API's

OpenCage Geocoder API - Geolocation services used in SOS
MeaningCloud - Sentiment analysis of the questions/descriptions being posted on the portal
MediaStack - Women in News API
D7 Networks - Instant messaging service
Cloudinary API - Products and Services image gallery