It began with two important things- a minuscule observation about small businesses in India, and the global pandemic.
On March 13th, 2020, University of Massachusetts sent out the email that told all students to leave the campus for good. On receiving this email, I had the important call back home with parents and we decided that I would come back. When I returned, I had to finish the rest of my semester. After that, I took 2 courses in the Summer. During the tail end of the Summer courses, I had started noticing that, the small businesses in and around Thane, were struggling very much. Many people still only had physical records of everything in their business. This was a problem.
My friend Apoorva Bajaj and I started working on this idea and called ourselves “WFH Integrations”, aka, Work From Home Integrations (Makes me want to die out of cringe now, but what’s done is done). We took on the task of helping the people who could no longer reach their offices during the lockdown- by bringing the office to their homes. We started with a few contacts of ours, and helped them set up a cloud system for their offices. This included the option of having a remote access server set up for their office, or integrate existing cloud service providers. This idea soon started losing steam, which was happening because of two reasons, I think-
- A majority of people were risking infection and continuing to go to their place of work. Choosing not to move online, because they would rather take that small risk.
- Lack of technological literacy. This had multiple effects, some people didn’t know the versatility of a cloud-based system, or of its existence. Others knew about the options but didn’t feel comfortable moving online.
As for the first reason, we talked to people about the convenience and safety of working from home and argued that these cloud-based systems will continue to improve their work experience post-lockdown. But people didn’t budge, because, again, they would rather flout the rules and continue to work in offices, than make changes to their workflow.
As of for the second reason, it needn’t exist. People didn’t trust the cloud because they thought their information could be lost there. They prefer physical setups in their offices. This one reason made me realise that a majority of business owners in Mumbai do not know what cloud is, or how it works. In simple terms, the “Cloud” is a vast set of computers somewhere else in the world. The data you store in the cloud is stored on those computers, and you access it through the internet. So, data on the cloud isn’t hanging some limbo, waiting to be lost. It is still on a physiscal computer, just not yours. This lack of information was troubling, as any small business, that doesn’t even have a proper IT Team, could make use of this.
Taking note of this situation, we realised that people need to be informed of all the technologies that are available for their use, and train them to use that tech. Hence, we organised a webinar for local businesses. Informing them of the advantages, disadvantages, and the usefulness of moving their business online. The webinar was fairly successful! And we’re working on another webinar based specificifically on Google’s Cloud System, since it’s applications are very user-friendly, and is most likely to be picked up by actual businessmen.
We’re continuing our venture with businesses, but now have also expanded into other areas, such as facilitating the transition to online for NGO’s, MUN’s, Youth Parliaments, Schools and Tuition Teachers. More than anything, and irrespective of the success of our unusual summer project, one thing is clear- people need to learn about technology. Not necessarily how it works, but what it can do for them. This way people can take advantage of so much technology with such ease, that has never been possible before.
Aamod Pant Balekundri 