COVID-19 Train Escort Management App for the Indian Railways

My dad works for the Indian Railways, and when special trains started running to transport migrant labourers during India’s response to the COVID-19, he discussed the logistical issue of managing police escorts on these trains and coordinating with different government agencies.

I designed a basic application to help him out with the usecases he mentioned and and coded it overnight in a 4 hour sprint. Admittedly, not very polished or tight on security, the web-app delivered on what was required. He presented it to his office, and within hours of coding the web-app, it was deployed online and used by thousands of Indian Railway employees all over the country.

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic began, I’ve been actively looking for ways to contribute to the fight against it. Before working on this web-app, I contributed to a project by PHFI to predict the number of hospital beds required in different districts based on current patient numbers and trends in different countries. This web-app though has had an admittedly more direct impact.

You can find the web-app deployed here : traincheck.pythonanywhere.com

The frontend is vanilla JS with HTML and CSS, while the backend is a simple Flask server with an SQLite database.

The code for the project is open sourced and available here, on GitHub.

Originally published at https://vivekkaushal.com on May 27, 2020.