HANDOUT

A mobile application for solving the serious issues of unbalance in food availability and food wastage – both at the cost of the same action.

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Inspiration

Food remains to be one of the most necessary factors determining life on earth. We came across few statistics about food in India which were mindblowing and were so dreadful to hear. According to the United Nations Development Programme, up to 40 per cent of the food produced in India is wasted. According to Hindustan Times around 67 million tonnes of food is wasted in India every year, which has a value of around Rs 92,000 crore. And it's enough to feed all of Bihar (A state in India) for a year. This value equals nearly two-thirds of the amount that the government needs to feed 600 million poor Indians with subsidised ration under the National Food Security programme. The most inspirational information we came through was that India wastes as much food as is consumed by the United Kingdom . Also, from our survey in various orphanages and homes, we came to know that there is no service that is homogeneous to ours and also the small orphanages with less number of inmates are often ignored by the donators. So this made us to finalize our problem statement which is

The surplus of food left over, as the exact number of serves can never be predicted accurately in function halls, restaurants, educational institutions, catering services and other places where food is produced on a large scale. On the other hand, the shortage of food in orphanage, old age homes, physically or mentally challenged homes

What it does

The proposed service is to develop a mobile application – “HANDOUT” for charity, which acts as a convenient connecting platform directly linking the community with surplus of food leftover (Donators) and the community with shortage of food (Requestors), so that there is a balance in the availability of food, also without any wastage. Economically, considering both food wastage and food acquisition by requestors, a huge expenditure can be saved. The proposed service also has an environmental benefit that various types of pollution due to food dumping can be avoided.

How we built it

We built it using MIT APP INVENTOR with FIREBASE for cloud service.

Challenges we ran into

The foremost thing is that our entire four team could not work fully on this project. Two were on ramadan fasting and one coudnt contribute due to medical reasons. So, only one was working. As we had started this project only when hacking hours began began, time was the most challenging factor. The video making also required enough time. So, we could not finish the entire project. We would complete the project as soon as possible.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Though we coudnt finish the entire project, we have completed nost of it and only a small part is remaining which we would complete in few hours time.

What we learned

Through this project we actually learnt things happening around in the Indian food industry. Technically we learnt all aspects of MIT app inventor and integrating it with firebase.

What's next for HANDOUT

After completing the remaining small part, we would like to work with the scalability of HANDOUT. Also we would like to plan about a volunteering team which would work with the genuinity of the registered donators and requestors in HANDOUT application.

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