IIT Bombay develops portal to arrange transport for NEET, JEE candidates to test centres
Five students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, have designed a web portal to help candidates appearing for National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) find transport to their test centres.
Five students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay, have designed a web portal to help candidates appearing for National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (NEET) and Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) find transport to their test centres.
EduRide is a web portal that connects candidates across the country with volunteers willing to drive or arrange a vehicle to their respective test centres. Any NEET or JEE candidate can log in on the website, enter details of location of residence and test centres. These details are then matched against volunteers, who are from a network of students and alumni of various IITs.
“We take preferences from a volunteer and he/she could either 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 publicity of the website. The portal is also raising funds to facilitate transport for candidates.
Since its launch on Saturday, the portal is receiving almost 200 entries a day for transport. The web portal was designed keeping in mind the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdown in various parts of the country.
However, IIT Bombay has clarified that it is merely facilitating the process of connecting a candidate with a volunteer, and does not authenticate the genuineness of either the candidate or the volunteer.
Scheduled to be held in September, NEET and JEE exams have been in the centre of a national controversy after the Supreme Court allowed the central government to conduct physical examinations, amid calls from distressed students to postpone or cancelling the exams. One of the problems cited by candidates is the lack of public transport facilities in the lockdown that can deter the candidates’ ability to reach their centres on time.
The EduRide portal has come forward to help students overcome the transport problem. Taking to social media, IIT Bombay director Subhasis Chaudhuri said, “In order to help the JEE (Main) and NEET candidates in various locations across the country, several students and alumni of IITs, including those of IIT Bombay, have come forward to connect needy candidates with the volunteers willing to help in transport or monetarily through an online portal http://eduride.in. I request volunteers to help in providing transport to the needy candidates in their neighborhood. Let us all help the future engineers, doctors and scientists of India.”
Kamna said that while the portal will do its best in finding a transport for such distressed candidates, they should also have a backup option ready.
“Since we have shortage of time, we can’t process every request with a guarantee but we are definitely striving towards it,” said Kamna, a final year Electrical Engineering student at IIT Bombay.
