New Delhi, India (PRWEB) August 19, 2015
Rahee.in, the world’s first crowd sourced law enforcement start-up, was launched on 15th August 2015, by a group of young IT professionals based in New Delhi, India.
Team Rahee has created an integrated mobile platform which will use the versatility and scalability of crowd sourcing to "force" people to follow traffic rules and drive safe. The idea is to reduce the load on over-burdened authorities and involve people in helping make our roads safe.
The Rahee platform will be available in select cities across the world so that citizens can not only report traffic offenses, but other problems like broken roads, littering, and other public grievances. Government authorities will get access to these issues so that they can issues tickets or take relevant action against the offenders based on the evidence uploaded by users.
Idea behind Rahee.in
Every Indian knows how dangerous and stressful driving is on Indian roads. It is not just the vehicle drivers, but pedestrians too risk their lives daily while travelling on unsafe roads. Every four minutes a person dies in a road accident. And every hour thousands get injured. High levels of stress are causing increased incidents of road rage. And it is not just these deaths and injuries, but non-compliance of traffic rules is resulting in higher pollution levels.
The single primary reason for all this mess is absolute lack of enforcement of traffic rules which has encouraged people to become non-compliant. From famous celebrities to high profile government ministers, countless people have lost their lives on our roads because people do not follow traffic rules.
“This is a serious problem screaming for an innovative solution. In a recent “Mann Ki Baat” aired on 26th July 2015, Prime Minister of India, Mr. Narendra Modi also raised concerns about road accidents and death of 4 people every minute in our country. Rahee is a social technology start-up born out of this frustration while driving on Indian roads, and the absolute lack of apathy for human life. We are starting with crowdsourced traffic enforcement, but will soon cover other initiatives like public littering, public nuisance and municipal issues like broken roads, overflowing drains and other infrastructural grievances”, says Vivek Thakur, an IIT Delhi alumnus and co-founder of Rahee.in.
Crowdsourcing with Rahee Mobile App
Rahee has a mobile app (launched initially for Android platform only) which users can download and then click various traffic offenses which will go to a central server where a team will process all the incoming offense reports and categorize them. The local authorities (for example local traffic police, municipal bodies) will be given access to these reports so that they can process each offence and send traffic tickets (challans) based on the photographic or video based evidence uploaded by different members. Based on the vehicle offense history, Rahee will also generate a score, a kind of a rating of a particular vehicle, which can be accessed freely to know how "good" the vehicle was driven. Later on, as a part of phase 2, Team Rahee plans to collate all this data and make it accessible to the insurance companies so that even if the violators do not pay tickets or challans, that amount can be added to their annual insurance premiums and claimed by traffic department once they renew their policies annually. Also, insurance companies will be free to charge higher premiums to vehicle owners with a "poor" Rahee rating.
Rahee’s Vision
For Rahee’s long term vision, Abhishek Sharma, co-founder, says: “Our aim is to make our roads safer through crowdsourcing and involving general public so that no traffic violator can think of going scot-free and can be punished not only through challans but also through a degraded vehicle rating. We believe in transparency, and the entire process has checks in place so that "fake" photographs are not used to create challans”.
Rahee mobile app is available to download from Google Play Store. To know more about how Rahee works, visit http://rahee.in.
