Rozgar is a humble app that aims to bring employment to the poorest of the poor of our country who don't have Whatsapp or Linkedin to search for jobs.
We all know the plight of migrant labourers post-COVID-19. A lot of the daily-wage-workers rushed to their homes in villages when the lockdown was instated. Now that these restrictions are being lifted, it's a real challenge for them to find employment. A lot of old businesses have been shut down and many others are running at a reduced capacity. Workers can use their simple 2G Feature Phones to register themselves on a nationwide database of workers actively seeking for employment by just sending a message.
The message will be sent to a toll free number in the following format:
<pin-code> <skill-code>
Here pin-code is the pin code of the location the worker wants to find employment in and skill-code represents the following skills:
| Skill Code | Skill |
|---|---|
| 1 | driver |
| 2 | labourer |
| 3 | maid |
| 4 | guard |
| 5 | carpenter |
| 6 | plumber |
| 7 | electrician |
Now the worker will be listed in the Rozgar app for being hired by a potential employer.
Employers have been hit really hard by a shortage of both skilled and unskilled workers. These employers can use our app to provide the pin code of their home or workplace and their requirement(maid, labourer) etc. to search for relevant workers near them. The employers can then contact these workers and hire them. So there's a win-win situation for both the hiring and the hired.
Here's the flow for employers to search for a worker:
We have integrated Firebase ML Kit to recognise text from images which can help all NGOs like https://nirmana.org and https://www.savengo.org which help poor people gain employment. If an NGO is maintaining a list of people seeking employment, they can directly scan it and bulk upload it on our database to accelerate the job search process instead of having to manually upload details of each worker one by one.
The list of workers just has to be given in the format:
<mobile_number> <skill> <pin-code>
<mobile_number> <skill> <pin-code>
<mobile_number> <skill> <pin-code>
.
.
.
The about us section of the app has a webview to the PM CARES Fund for COVID-19 Relief where you can go and donate to help in the battle against Coronavirus.
The text recognition feature for NGOs for bulk addition of workers to database uses Firebase ML Vision Kit under the hood.
The search workers part for Employers has pagination implemented in it and fetches 10 workers in each API request and shows them to the user.
While building this app, the biggest challenge we faced was to establish communication with poor workers who don't have internet access or expensive smartphones. We brainstormed it and came up with this messaging solution. Using text messages, we can easily and cheaply obtain data of millions of workers across india and add them to our database. We used Integromat to read messages and then sent the information to a NodeJS API endpoint which parses all the relevant information and enters it into our database.
Another challenge we faced was to integrate the ML Kit into the app. Both of us in the team had no previous experience in using Firebase ML Kit. But we read the documentation and learnt it on the spot and were successfully able to implement it in our app within the time limit.
The biggest accomplishment is that we were able to complete all the features that we planned to implement. We were also able to include all the problem statements in our app in a meaningful manner. Overall we are really happy with the app and we feel it can actually help thousands of people who are struggling to put food on the table for themselves and their families.
As far as the completion status goes, the first stable build is complete and we can use all the functionalities of the app. If we had to make any changes after this hack to this app, we would try to move the message handling service to a more scaleable (albeit more expensive) provider. But Integromat is good enough for now.
The most important thing we feel that we learnt by participating in this hackathon is the importance of focusing on making an MVP and not getting stuck in the petty and less important stuff. Had we focussed too much on the intricacies without considering our target audience and the users needs, we would have never been able to finish this app.
Note: Make sure your Flutter environment is setup.
In the command terminal, run the following commands:
$ git clone https://github.com/vasumanhas000/rozgar-app.git
$ cd rozgar-app
$ flutter run
Open the project in Xcode from ios/Runner.xcodeproj.
Hit the play button.
Run the following command in your terminal.
$ open -a Simulator
$ flutter run
Make sure you have an Android emulator installed and running.
Run the following command in your terminal.
$ flutter run
Check out Flutter’s online documentation for help getting start with your Flutter project.
$ git clone https://github.com/sudo-vaibhav/rozgar.git
$ cd rozgar
$ npm i && node app.js
