11-year-old Kolkata boy creates App to donate unused medicines

Kolkata:Yuvraj Shah, all of eleven years, has become a messiah of sorts for many after he created the Medmaze App, which helps people donate their unused but not expired medicine to government hospitals. 

One day the Kolkata boy noticed that his grandfather's medicine was not being used after he finished the required dosage and realized that many unused medicines could save lives when he saw leftover medicines being thrown out after the expiry date. Usually, a doctor prescribes medicines to a patient for the complete course of treatment that may last several weeks. The patient goes and buys medicines from the pharmacy for the entire course of treatment.

However, in most cases, the patient gets cured before he consumes the entire set of medicines and stops taking the medicines as soon as he or she gets cured. This leads to a lot of unused medicines in every household.

Across India, many underprivileged people do not have access to medicines which often leads to even common illnesses sometimes posing severe life risk. Sometimes, there's also shortage of medicines in the government hospitals due to which even patients who are covered under government's healthcare scheme and cannot afford medicines have to purchase them from private shops. To tackle this situation, Yuvraj created the Medmaze App.

With the increasing cost of medicines in India, the boy felt the need to have some way of helping people who cannot afford them. While learning coding on the WhiteHat Jr platform, Yuvraj thought of using his learning to create an app to solve this issue and help people in need. This is when he decided to build the Medmaze App. The app allows individuals to connect with the nearest government hospital and donate the leftover medicines.

The hospitals can in turn can give them to those who cannot afford them. Once logged in, the app allows users to provide details of the medicines like name, expiry date, number of strips available, etc. The hospitals can then log in to see the details and connect with the users to get the medicines. This way, the app will help reduce wastage of medicines and make them available to the needy for free.

Yuvraj is one of the twelve winners of the Silicon Valley Programme conducted by WhiteHat Jr., according to a release issued here today. His app was selected after vetting 7000+ entries from across India, where kids were invited to think of an original idea that solves a real-life problem and code an app independently. 

As a part of this programme, he will visit the Silicon Valley in the US to pitch his app to top venture capitalists (VCs) like Nexus Venture Partners and Owl Ventures. During the weeklong trip, he will also meet some noted Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to learn valuable lessons on entrepreneurship, get an opportunity to visit Googleplex and interact with their engineers, as well as visit the Waymo facility to experience driverless cars and talk to their product managers.

'Kids today are very aware of societal issues and want to contribute in their own way to address them. We are witnessing many young kids like Yuvraj creating truly transformational and high impact apps within just 40 hours of coding on the WhiteHat Jr platform, that will make a lasting impact on the world,' said Karan Bajaj, Founder and CEO, WhiteHat Jr. 

All these kids are learning to code on WhiteHat Jr, an EdTech startup that teaches coding to kids between 6 to 14 years of age. Teaching cutting-edge curriculum on technologies like AI, robotics, machine learning and space tech, the startup aims to harness natural creativity of kids and shift their mindset from being consumers to creators at an early age. After seeing great success for its online platform, the company is working to bring its AI and robotics coding curriculum to schools across the country. They are also soon starting a 15 under 15 fellowship wherein WhiteHat Jr will help the top 15 kids on the platform incubate their own startups and provide a $15000 fellowship to them, the release added.(UNI)