As desperation grows at hospitals, Indian teenagers harness technology to find life-saving supplies

As their government struggles to tackle the pandemic, young Indians are stepping into the breach.

Many are delivering vital supplies, using social media to direct resources or setting up apps to crowdsource aid.

Schoolgirl Swadha Prasad is finding life-saving oxygen, medicine and hospital beds for Covid-19 patients, having finished her exam revision.

Swadha works with dozens of volunteers aged between 14 and 19 as part of the youth-led organisation Uncut, building online databases packed with information about medical resources available across the country.

It is a 24/7 operation, with the teenagers constantly on their phones as they verify the availability of supplies, update information in real time and field calls from frantic relatives.

“Some of us do midnight-to-morning shifts, because the calls don’t stop at 3am,” said Swadha, 17, who works a 14-hour stretch from before midday until 1am.

It is a long and often tiring task, the Mumbai pupil said.

“If I can help save a life, there is no part of me that is going to say no.”

And lives have been saved, Swadha said, mentioning a case where the team was able to find oxygen for a young Covid-19 patient in the middle of the night after an agonising two-hour wait.

“It’s not only about providing resources ... sometimes people just need to know they are not alone,” she said.

India is a young country. Two thirds of its 1.3 billion people are under 35.

As the country’s pandemic grows, with crematoriums running out of space and patients, including a former ambassador, dying in hospital car parks, many have volunteered.

In the slums of Mumbai, Shanawaz Shaikh, 32, is providing free oxygen to thousands of people.

Popularly known as the “oxygen man”, Mr Shaikh sold his cherished SUV last June to fund the initiative after his friend’s pregnant cousin died in a rickshaw while trying to get admitted to a hospital.

“She died because she couldn’t get oxygen in time,” he told AFP.

He never expected to be fielding so many requests nearly a year later.

“We used to get about 40 calls a day last year, now it’s more like 500,” he said.

Mr Shaikh’s team of 20 volunteers is also battling a shortage made worse by profiteers.

“It’s a test of one’s faith,” he said, describing how he sometimes travels dozens of kilometres to find oxygen for desperate patients.

While major cities have borne the brunt so far, the limits of technology are becoming apparent as the virus burrows into smaller towns and villages, said software engineer Umang Galaiya, 25.

Urgent requests for supplies and spare hospital beds led to a flood of leads on Twitter, many of them unconfirmed.

Mr Galaiya responded by building an application to make it easier for users to find what they are looking for and, crucially, limit their search to verified resources only.

But even so, his app is unlikely to help people outside big cities, he said, giving the example of his hometown in hard-hit Gujarat state where internet use is low.

“If I look for resources in Jamnagar, there is nothing on Twitter,” he said.

He outlined simple measures that could save many lives.

Officials could have created a real-time, automatically updated online registry of beds, for instance, to spare distressed patients the effort of running from one packed hospital to another.

“If we can do it for movie theatres, to avoid overbooking, why can’t we do it for hospitals?” he asked.

Requests for supplies and spare hospital beds led to a flood of leads on Twitter, many of them unconfirmed