BENGALURU: Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike’s (BBMP) welfare department has tied up with a private party as a part of the company’s corporate social responsibility wing, to further develop an app meant to document homeless people found in the city. The app will include features such as facial recognition, location, names and documentation if any. Currently, volunteers use an in-house app for tracking the homeless, which will be upgraded and made available to all.
“We are working to include many categories in this app. It will include missing children found on the streets, senior citizens, especially dementia patients who are wandering on the roads with no recollection of their identity, and third, adult women and men who were found during the homeless survey done in the past few months,” said an official from the welfare department of BBMP.
While they did not reveal the name of the company, the official said the project will include a website and app that will take a year to see completion. “We are thinking of having a helpline number for people to contact us on. Should an ordinary citizen find a child wandering alone on the street, begging or lost, they can contact BBMP immediately.
Our staff will rescue the child, take him or her to the homeless shelter and upload the details onto the platform. We will co-ordinate with the Karnataka State Police, in case they are tracking any children based on missing complaints filed,” the official said, adding that the app is being developed at the company’s cost and the BBMP will not have to spend any money on it.
The shelters that are being identified by the department will be segregated accordingly, to house children, senior citizens with illness such as dementia, homeless adult women and men separately. So far, the homeless survey undertaken in co-ordination with 30 NGOs under the umbrella of Impact India consortium has found 5,109 urban homeless people in the city.
BBMP has given itself a target of having 30 homeless shelters running by March 31. This is based on a Supreme Court directive in 2010, which instructed all states to set up homeless shelters where the population exceeded 10 lakh people. It was however only in October 2018 that the BBMP began conducting surveys to take stock of the situation.