BENGALURU: It was the May of 2021, the peak of the second wave of Covid-19, when the country was struggling to find ICU beds, oxygen, plasma and more. A group of volunteers who had never met each other, created a bot called CovidAsha to connect with suppliers and vendors, 24/7. Spearheaded by marketing professional Alysha Lobo, CovidAsha was born out of desperation.
Lobo got techies — Krishna Vatsal Tyagi, Karan Kantoor and Tamaghna Basu — on board to take care of building the bot and ensuring that everything was running smoothly. Eventually, many other volunteers from across the country, including students and working professionals from Bengaluru, were providing real-time verified information on oxygen procurement, refilling and ambulance services.
The reach of the team was large, so much so that when India’s second wave was tapering and numbers were going up in Indonesia, Lobo and team offered to help out as well. They worked closely with the team of Citizens Help Citizens in Indonesia through WhatsApp. On Tuesday, the Indonesian Health Minister presented the work of CovidAsha at the 76th United Nations General Assembly.
Lobo says, “It’s a great honour to be recognised for the work we did. It was beyond satisfying that we could help save so many lives. When Facebook US approached us to do a video about our work, we were overwhelmed to hear some of the success stories of those who used the bot.”
Lobo, who has lived in Bengaluru for seven years, was so used to the easy access and technology available around us. “When I had to move to Goa just before the second wave, I realised it’s not so easy here. And WhatsApp was the only easily available platform. That’s why we built the bot to be WhatsApp-friendly. The app team has also been very helpful throughout the process,” she says.
She points out that building a bot from scratch, without any prior experience from the volunteers, was far from easy. “It’s like everyone knew someone who knew someone and within 48 hours, we had the bot up and running,” says the marketer, who will be moving back to Bengaluru next month.
So when Facebook approached Lobo last month to talk about the success of the bot, she was thrilled. She says, “WhatsApp became the means to the ends and the ends to the means. We worked with them throughout the whole process, for India and Indonesia, and that’s what will be showcased at the UN.”
Lobo says that everything that the bot needed wouldn’t have happened so smoothly if not for it being built in the Silicon Valley of India.
She adds, “We’re using technology for social good and it honestly doesn’t get better than that. Though none of us has met or worked with each other, we became a solid group that helped make a change. It was a purely volunteer initiative and many of us worked overtime after our full-time jobs and made sure we
fought the second wave courageously.”