Srinagar: Two techies are winning hearts after they developed a user-friendly website to connect plasma donors with the recipients in order to save lives in Kashmir.
Hailing from Srinagar’s Indira Nagar, Jaswinder Singh, 24, and Vidur Tickoo, 25, developed www.getpalsma.in which helps COVID patients to find donors online without much trouble.
Interestingly, the website is designed to work on low speed 2G internet.
On the website, the donors and patients can register details including name, email, contact number, blood group, and district. For donors, an additional column of date of recovery is added to make sure that they are eligible for donating plasma.
Both the donor and recipient profiles get displayed on the website and they automatically connect with each other.
Singh, who is currently working as a software engineer in Chandigarh said the main motive behind creating a virtual network was to store a data profile of donors and recipients so that they can connect with each other easily.
“Normally, the appeal for plasma is posted on Twitter, which hasn’t a wide reach in Kashmir. So, it came to our mind that a website or virtual network can be a solution that can help both the donors and patients,” he said.
Singh said the developing part of the website was challenging considering the limitation of low internet speed in Kashmir.
“We wanted it to be user friendly. Any person who has a Facebook or WhatsApp can use it by just submitting his or her details. The website can be a sort of data bank of donors, who can be easily contacted when the need arises,” he said.
Singh said that their initiative is getting a good response from the people. “We are not part of any NGO. It is an individual humanitarian initiative. We appeal to the government to share data with us so that people’s job of looking for donors becomes easier. Even the government can use this website to strengthen its plasma donation campaign,” he said.
The plasma donation campaign is getting popular in Kashmir by the day. A large proportion of the COVID-19 recovered patients are coming forward to save the lives of serious patients.
More than 570 people have died due to COVID in Jammu and Kashmir. There are 30,000 cases in the union territory. Of whom, as many as 21,000 have fully recovered in the last five months. A number of social groups are working to encourage people to donate plasma to save lives in Kashmir.
