A new mobile application (App) for ensuring safety, particularly of women, was launched in Chandigarh on the eve of National Girl Child Day on January 24 even as the Tricity (Chandigarh, Mohali, and Panchkula) have recently witnessed a spate of rapes. The developers of the App Kahan Ho Aap (Where are you?) claim that it is the only one in the world providing multiple tracking with the route creation. It is developed by a start-up company.
The CEO of the start-up Nitin Gupta said, “We have many applications which provide for sending SOS messages to a few known people in an emergency which is not always possible in unforeseen unfortunate circumstances. This application scores on all its competitors as it will provide a route map of the destination where the member is going and the people in the group can calculate the time in which she will reach. aking care of the privacy quotient, the member can choose to be just the watchman in the group or can drop from sharing the location as and when he or she likes.”
Talking to The Statesman, Nitin said, “An early launch of this application could have avoided or at least helped in tracing the accused in two rape cases which shamed the city towards the end of 2016 and the beginning of this year.”
A working girl was raped at knife-point near Tribune Chowk at around 8 pm on December 12, 2016. It is the roundabout which chokes in the peak hours with the swelling traffic.
Another rape incident that shamed and scared the Tricity was in Panchkula last week when a college student was allegedly abducted at gun-point from a posh market in a car and raped.
More recently, a minor from Kansal village was raped near Sector 25 in Chandigarh by a man from her village who had lured her with a promise to get her a job.
Gupta said that the app developed by his associates can help check such instances. He further claimed that it can also be used for offices, educational institutes, couriers, food delivery, BPO’s and IT companies.