The problem Raddiwala solves

India has a significant unorganized sector consisting of highly localized small-scale "raddiwalas" as they are popularly known. They are scrap dealers who buy domestic scrap and junk, such as old newspapers, discarded electronic and metallic items by weight from the homes of people.

The way it works in most parts of the country is that a "raddiwala" goes around from place to place calling for people willing to sell their scrap and recyclable waste and are thus dependent on whether the person who is willing to sell hears their call.
This is a highly inefficient process for everyone involved. The raddiwala’s have to spend a lot of time and energy finding potential customers, and for people having scrap at their homes many times, it simply becomes easier to dump it in the trash rather than waiting for a "raddiwala" to come by and buy it from them. This is a rampant problem and ultimately leads to a lot of potentially recyclable material being sent to dumping grounds instead of being collected, recycled, and reused.

Our website bridges the gap between the "raddiwala" and the domestic scraps holders. Whenever someone wants to sell their scrap, they can easily book a scrap dealer registered with our platform to come to their place at a convenient time, along with a fixed rate chart so that they know exactly how much money to expect. Consequently, scrap dealers close to the location of the seller would be notified, and the first person to accept it gets the contract. Our website centralizes, standardizes, and brings under one roof the significantly decentralized sector of "raddiwala".

We believe that technology has the capability to make lives simpler and contribute positively to our society and with the same spirit, our website aspires to contribute to the goal of making our planet greener and promote recycling and reusing.

Challenges we ran into

We had very limited time to plan, develop and test our product. Debugging the code was an arduous task that took a lot of time and effort. Moreover, we faced some difficulties while connecting the API, aligning the chatbot and connecting our product's information to a real-time database. However, we learnt a lot from these hurdles and managed to come up with a very unique product aimed towards waste management. We took help from our mentors and watched some tutorials to deep dive into the concept of databse and application programming interface. We also referred to sites like GeeksforGeeks and W3Schools to learn higher level css and resolve clashes in the website caused by the API.