Five students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Mumbai, have designed a web portal to help candidates taking the National Entrance and Eligibility Test (NEET) and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) to find transportation to their testing centers.
EduRide is a web portal that connects candidates from across the country with volunteers willing to drive or organize a vehicle for their respective test centers. Any NEET or JEE candidate can log into the website, enter details of residence location and test centers. These details are then compared with those of the volunteers, who belong to a network of students and alumni of various IITs.
“We take the preferences of a volunteer and he / she could drive the student or arrange a vehicle for the student. Our portal tries to map a suitable student from a particular area to a volunteer from the same area, ”said Kriti Kamna, who handles advertising for the website. The portal is also raising funds to facilitate the transportation of candidates.
Since its launch on Saturday, the portal is receiving nearly 200 daily tickets for transportation. The web portal was designed with the Covid-19 pandemic and the closure in various parts of the country in mind.
However, IIT Bombay has clarified that it simply facilitates the process of connecting a candidate with a volunteer and does not authenticate the authenticity of either the candidate or the volunteer.
Slated to take place in September, the NEET and JEE exams have been at the center of a national controversy after the Supreme Court allowed the central government to conduct physical exams, amid calls from distraught students to postpone or cancel the exams. One of the problems cited by the candidates is the lack of means of public transport in the confinement that can discourage candidates from reaching their centers on time.
The EduRide portal has been launched to help students overcome the transportation problem. On social media, IIT Bombay Director Subhasis Chaudhuri said: “In order to assist JEE (Main) and NEET candidates in various locations around the country, several IIT students and alumni, including those from IIT Bombay, have come forward to connect needy candidates with volunteers willing to help with transportation or financially through an online portal http://eduride.in. I solicit volunteers to help provide transportation to candidates in need in your neighborhood. Let us all help the future engineers, doctors and scientists in India. ”
Kamna said that while the portal will do its best to find a means of transportation for such distressed candidates, they should also have a backup option ready.
“Since we are short on time, we cannot process every request with a guarantee, but we definitely strive to do so,” said Kamna, a senior Electrical Engineering student at IIT Bombay.
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