On first week of April 2018 a team from SRM Deemed to be University, Katankulathur participated in Smart Hackathon 2018 at Hubli, Kolkata and bagged the 1st place with a cash prize of 1 lakh rupees. The problem statement provided by the Ministry of Statistics and Program Implementation was to help solve the problems associated with the Consumer Price Index data collection. The main objectives were real time data collection of prices of general commodities, improvements in data validation and scrutiny and ensuring physical presence of data collectors in market. Currently collection of data of prices for commodities in each shop in various areas takes place manually and then is entered to the system through Web Portal. Validations are done after data collection hence systems need to be improved.
Since, physical presence of data collectors is not monitored SRM team proposed a solution. A two layered authentication system through a novel approach cryptographically generated QR code along with GPS validation to ensure the physical presence of data collector. The data validation was suggested to be done through comparison of previous and present entries from the data collectors which also provided an alert if there, is a marked change in price when comparing to previous data. Apart from this, there was real time graph representation in the mobile app for easy visualization and verification of data.
To the novel approach in providing solution for attendance system for field staff and for designing good usability of app by providing features like maps to monitor, presentable data sheets and for multi lingual capability of app, SRM team was appreciated. Proof of concept and implementation methodology won them the first place.
