Sabarmati Ashram develops mobile app on Mahatma Gandhi

The Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust has taken upon itself to connect Mahatma Gandhi to modern technology and bring him right on your mobile phone. It not only has an information technology division by now but more than that has developed an application with which you could download all copyright-free books and material on Gandhi on your mobile phone.

All the works, letters and pictures of him that are available in the mind-boggling seven lakh pages on Gandhi Heritage Portal would be available for download on your cell phones. "We are almost done and just giving finishing touches to the app," the Trust's IT head Virat Kothari told Mail Today.

It could take just about a couple of months for the application to be available. Kothari said the app would be compatible to android phones as well as iphones. He said besides tourists and others, the facility would be quite helpful to researchers.

The Trust has also developed another application called the Sabarmati Ashram Guide, which according to Kothari, will be wi-fi enabled. It will have the complete history and visuals of every place in the Ashram that will be right on the visitors' tabs just as they enter.

For example, when a tourist enters the Magan Nivas at the Ashram, he will get to know beforehand on his tab what all he is going to see and its historical perspective along with the visuals.

The Gandhi Heritage Portal is a free-for-all application.

According to Kothari, it would have accurate details and information compared to that provided by a guide. "A guide could always throw in his own perspective and interpretation, but this will not be the case here," he explains.

For starters, the guide would be available only in Gujarati. But the Sabarmati Trust has plans to make it in all United Nations' languages to facilitate foreign tourists. The guide will be out soon.

The information technology division of the Sabarmati Trust is the prime mover of the apps as well as two websites, Gandhi Heritage Portal and gandhiashramsabarmati. org. Set up three years ago, the IT division has done pioneering work in connecting Gandhi with modern technology.

The division not only monitors both the websites 24X7, but Kothari has developed robots that report to him if a site malfunctions.

"I get up three times in the night to see if the robot has reported anything on my email, though no problem has occurred so far," he said.

The content team, whose editor is senior researcher and writer Tridip Suhrud, uploads 10,000 pages of material every month on the websites. "To ensure that there is complete transparency, we also report on the last day of every month how many pages and what material we have uploaded," Kothari added.