Fighting against hunger

Inspiration

Hunger in India remains an alarming issue and every year around 25 lakhs people lose their lives to hunger related causes. One can only imagine how difficult it must be for the families who go to bed everyday starving and thinking they might get food the next day. On the other hand food wastage has become an intense problem for the other section of society. Restaurants, Marriage Halls and many other organizations have to dump daily such large quantities of food because they don't have anyone to feed it before the food rots or become inedible.

What it does

With an aim to connect the two sections of society so that one can help the other and that no person sleeps with an empty stomach and no food goes waste, our website would help different organisations to connect with NGOs or Volunteers who work tirelessly to feed every single person. NGOs and Volunteers can pick food packets from restaurants or any other place that has abundant extra food and deliver to nearby slums or people in need. Restaurants may enter their names and Location and they will be provided with a list of nearby Slums or Active NGOs and contacts of Social Workers who can help them deliver the food to the needy people. Complete address of slums will be provided so they can navigate on their own if they wish to.

How we build it

We were concerned about the hunger problems in our country and the number of casualties that occur every year. We decided to model our website currently for only one city i.e. Mumbai. Our team worked on the frontend using HTML and CSS to give the site a skeleton and add some styling features. Our team used web scrapping to extract locations of Slums, active NGOs and their contacts. We used Flask framework and python language for backend to provide functionality to the webpage.

Challenges we ran into

Finding a proper dataset was one of the major problems. Some of the database is outdated and will have to check the dataset from time to time.

Accomplishments we are proud of

Although there is a lot of features we could add to make the project better but we are yet proud of what we have achieved. The impact our project idea will have on society as it could become a helping step in eliminating hunger from the country. The website correctly displays the locations and contacts of NGOs and slums in the proximity of the given restaurant/function halls.

What we learned

Web development has a lot to learn and we clearly had a great start by participating in the hackathon. Also we learnt Teamwork and Time Management.

What's next for Fighting Against Hunger

We will try to model every city in India so that more and more people can use the website. We will also try to get population and requirement statistics of every slum so that food can be distributed efficiently.