Meal Ganj

Inspiration

To be honest with you, the inspiration was all around me, or perhaps the sufferings of the people. The irony in India that we waste tons of food in our large social gatherings for eg. Marriages and yet people starve, and suffer from malnutrition. There was a gap between food that was being wasted and the people who needed it and that is where Meal Ganj came to the rescue.

What it does

Meal Ganj as a whole, works on volunteer basis and direct use. Say, you saw a poor man who is very hungry and in need of money but you have nothing to give him. All you need to do is go to our website and type where you are and submit. That's it! it will list all nearby places where extra food is available for people in need.

For the people who want to list spare food available somewhere its also simple. Go to our website, fill easily the spare food form and type your location (or we can autodetect it)

How we built it

Its built in simple html/css/js while using some api like openstreetmap, opencagedata and firebase for database to store food listings.

Challenges we ran into

Finding map services, setting up database and trying to figure out how to place markers on the map was all a bit tricky but we made it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The best part is its available also in local language Hindi. To translate you just have to press 1 button!

What we learned

The best thing I learn in this project was working with maps and geocoding.

What's next for Meal Ganj

Currently the map and geocoding service is weak (have very less locations) and also its currently limited to Ajmer. We will port it to google maps api and expand the area to entire India . Bring on captcha to prevent robot form submissions. Overall we are on a mission of A hunger free India