IIT Goa students develop a mobile App for stray animal census and welfare in Goa.

Date : 28-03-2023

A team of students at IIT Goa have developed an Android mobile app for stray animal welfare and census. The app is called WAGS (Welfare and Guidance for Strays) and allows users to systematically record information about stray animals in their locality including aspects such as photos, location, vaccination/neutering status, health, identification marks etc, view all entries in a given area or category, and visualize their locations on a map. The app also allows users to post alert messages about injured animals, adoption and neutering drives etc that are automatically shared among all users of the app. Most importantly, the app lists contacts of services such as animal hospitals and ambulances and organizations conducting animal birth control and vaccinations and provides links to guidelines on stray welfare, population control and laws and guidelines released by the Govt of India. The app is aimed at assisting population control and welfare of strays through crowd sourced information and effort. In addition, the open database can help government agencies to track stray populations in various localities. The android app is freely available (as an apk file) at the following website: https://stray-welfare-iitgoa.github.io/WAGS/ The app was developed by a student team consisting of: Kartikey Sharma, Surya Shukla, Krishnaveni Unnikrishnan, Aditya Koshti and Harshvardhan Gupta. The students were mentored by Dr. Neha Karanjkar and Dr. Clint George who are faculty members at IIT Goa, with inputs from animal welfare agencies. The development was supported by a CSR grant to IIT Goa by Siemens which funded the student internships.