Bengaluru techie’s website helps families track those missing in Nepal floods

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Arfath Mohammad, Bengaluru-based techie, has developed the website ReuniteIndia.com | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The website helps families and friends track their near and dear ones by gathering information from government websites in Nepal and India. | Photo Credit: File photo

To help families and friends track their loved ones missing in the Nepal floods, a Bengaluru-based techie has developed a website, ReuniteIndia.com.

Arfath Mohammad is a senior solutions architect, a mentor for programming languages and AI. The website helps families and friends track their near and dear ones by gathering information from government websites in Nepal and India.

“There are various sources through which families in India and across the world are still looking for their loved ones who were lost in the Nepal floods. As on September 8, our website has a list of more than 665 individuals, which includes missing, rescued, and those who are safe. The information comes from four sources, including Nepal’s National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Authority (NDRRMA), the Nepal police, India’s Ministry of External Affairs (via their official @MEAIndia account), and reports submitted directly by families and individuals through the platform,” Mr. Mohammad said.

He added: “Of the 665 individuals, 477 located are safe and 188 are still missing. Every submission goes through manual review before it is published and nothing goes live automatically on my website because the organisations track people through different agencies. For example, one organisation might track people registered through specific travel agencies, another a specific district. Our total reflects confirmed records compiled across all of these official channels, which can add up to more than any single agency’s own published count.” 

He noted that having all the information on a single platform ReuniteIndia.com helps families who are right now stuck piecing together information scattered across dozens of PDFs, helplines, and social media posts. 

What makes the website unique is it has all the latest information of every single person in the list. Mr. Mohammad explained: “Every case page includes a QR code linking to the person’s current status, so someone scanning an old poster can still see the latest information. There’s also a hospital and police station locator near the last-seen location, and guidance on what to do if a police complaint hasn’t been filed yet.”

Similarly, the website acts as a validation engine whenever there are unverified rumours and outdated posts found on social media. “We verify information matching crowdsourced directly with official government releases before confirming statuses and present it to the people. Some individual names in the official Nepal police disaster bulletins appear in Devanagari script or informal transliteration rather than standard English spelling — meaning the same person can show up under two or three different spellings across different official sources. For an Indian family searching for a loved one, most of whom don’t read Nepali, that’s a real barrier at exactly the moment they need information fastest. We reconcile all of this into one consistent, correctly-spelled, English-accessible record.” he added.

At present, he is currently working on to add an AI chatbot on the resources page of the website to help answer people’s questions directly. 

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