Kisanmitra - Rural Distress Helpline

Our Vision is to create a Open Source Multi Channel Citizen Grievance Redressal mechanism which could work in a very simple fashion gathering various stake holders to come together and solve the problem. One instance of it is the current Kisanmitra project where I am involved for past three years, We currently work with 3 districts in Telangana on the ground to report issues received from farmers and follow the issues with various departments and hierarchies in the District administration towards resolution. Similar issues are clubbed together and shared with district administration for policy changes and issues unresolved at District level are escalated to state level.

• We are currently using only a toll free number and field work as channels to receive issues and would want to explore Whatsapp Integration also.

• Currently we use Erpnext/Frappe (https://erpnext.com/open-source-saas-help-desk-software) as base tech in integration with Exotel, but we have realised that a simplistic UI for Govt officials to check their issues and respond is needed and this needs to be built either on Frappe/Erpnext in itself or could be worked out as a separate module. The UI would need to have action to respond to issues by commenting on the issue after viewing the issue in detail, and updating the status in a limited way.

• The district Collector and other senior Officials would need a dashboard to see the open issues.

• We would also need a simple UI for farmers also to check the status of their issue too. This should be mobile friendly.

• There should be an open dashboard which could be opened up to public for the status of the helpline for transparency and better accountability and for various other stake holders like Media, Activists to understand the issues pending and for them to participate.

• Identifying Distress cases and trying to prevent Suicides is also one of the main intentions behind starting Kisanmitra and its also a challenge we need to work on.

• With the recent Upgradation to Erpnext V13 we have a few bugs with Phone call Integration which needs to be fixed and would need some hands on coding skills too. PR related to this is here (https://github.com/frappe/erpnext/pull/22181)

• The team which evolves out of this if interested could continue further as support team for the project and reaching out to wider tech community in true Open source spirit.

• A detailed presentation of project and various aspects we cover :

• Website of Kisanmitra

• Some old article on Kisanmitra :

Looking for

• UI Designers

• Frappe/Erpnext Folks

• People Interested in Civic Rights

• People who could debug Python/JS

• If you are really interested in the idea and excited to spend a couple of days hacking on it :)