Reinventing the process of buying land in India

Land is the reason for more than 80% disputes in the Indian courts. Land is the reason for most of the world's wars. What if land was more structured and transparent? It would make lives better and the market 100 times more liquid.

Keeping that in mind, I, along with my classmates Susheel Suresh, Venkat Datta and Sushanth Hegde, have built the following project at a hackathon conducted by Housing.

Our project consists of three parts.

1. To provide personilized suggestions to users- We ask the user what his purpose of buying the land is, whether he wants it for residential purposes or whether he is an investor.Based on his response , we can ask the user a bunch of questions inorder to provide him the best personilized recommendations. If the user was looking to buy land for residential purposes for example, we would ask him to list his priorities in order, like closeness to hospitals, educational institutes etc. This way we can provide different suggestions to different users based on their needs. For this we have divided the city of Bangalore into 6 sectors. We use Google Places API to get the total number of hospitals/ schools/ malls, or whatever the user has asked for, and suggest an area with the best combination of all the users needs. 

2. To eliminate site visit- Once we show the user the suggested region, he would want to know the locality and probably see many pictures and videos to get an idea of it. What websites like magic bricks do currently is that they send a team down to different locations in random cities and ask them to take videos and pictures of the locality. This is very inefficient as the area the small team can cover is limited. We propose to crowd source this process of taking photos and videos. For this purpose, we have made an android app, wherein the user signs in , takes a photo, writes optional comments, and uploads the image. The latitude and longitude of the users position area automatically taken and a marker is put on the map. In order to make it crowd sourced, any person who uploads photos and videos of his area is given points. Once the number of points crosses a limit, we provide incentives like 'free movie ticket' or 'free ola ride' etc. This will result in a large number of pictures and videos in any particular area over time, and is the best thing after google street view. This will help the buyer know more about the area and hence avoid a site visit.

3. To make the transaction process more transparent-

Once the user is decided and has shortlisted two-three properties, he would want to make sure that there is no discripancy in the documents. The current process is very cummbersome for the user. He has to spend a lot of time in getting documents verified, getting legal advice (this also includes the countless amount of money and time he spends on bribes and various processes). This is one of the main reasons why people are hesitant in buying land. We try to simplify the process by making the entire process transparent. What we have proposed is a 'Land Document Index (LDI)', which gives an overall score for every site/house. We do this by an empirical formula which takes into consideration all documents needed and also gives higher weightage to important and sensitive documents like 'Khata or Encumbrance Ceritificates'. The user has to pay a small fee to get this first hand verified information about that plot. These documents are verified by a legal council. Once he pays the fee, he can see the LDI and also see all related documents. This makes the system transparent and the process effortless. We also provide a chat service where the user can contact a the tied up legal council and also the owner of the land he's interested in. This makes the entire ecosystem of buying and selling land easy, efficient, transparent and productive.

All these factors used together would reinvent the way people look at the land market and would change the face of the online real estate market. It would also encourage more people to buy and sell land.

Code can be found here - 

https://github.com/tarunsharma1/reinventing-the-process-of-buying-and-selling-land

Thank you for reading :)

Real time content based ads

Whenever you watch a video on YouTube, or any website for that matter and whenever an ad shows up, we immediately start hunting for that small 'x' button or the 'skip ad' button. Why do we do so? Aren't ads useful? Aren't ads the reason why we know when a new product which is desire is out in the market?
The reason we always tend to avoid the ads while browsing, is that the ads have no relation what so ever to the content of the video you want to watch. If I am keenly interested in watching the highlights of yesterdays football game online, and an ad about a car shows up, I will immediately skip it as it no relation to my temporary interest i.e watching the football highlights. But if the car ad was to be replaced with a football ad, then that would probably capture my attention and I am more likely to watch the entire football ad rather than the car ad.
This is the problem our project addresses. Before reading any further let me tell you what we have achieved. Through this project, if you are watching a video in which the topic of discussion has something to do with cars, then a car ad shows up on the side..and if the topic of discussion suddenly changes to say bikes, an ad about bikes shows up !! Yes, it is real time..here is the video for you to see yourself.

Read on to find out how we implemented this.

A Smarter Education System...

This was a project done by me and my classmates Susheel,Venkat and Vinay at a hackathon called Simplihack, held at the SimpliLearn office in Bangalore. SimpliLearn is the world's leading certification training provider with offices in Houston and Bangalore(http://www.simplilearn.com/).
 They provide certified online as well as offline training to professionals on courses such as project management, Hadoop and big data, android, six sigma etc. SimpliHack, was a hackathon aimed at improving education technologies.

Our aim was to focus on improving the teaching methodologies of the online pre-recorded video lectures. On going through a few samples, we found the interaction to be very one way. The person watching the video has no way to communicate with the mentor apart from mailing him and waiting for his reply. This can become very cumbersome to someone who has alot of doubts. We also believe that true learning is achieved only when the user applies what he has learnt, maybe through projects.

Keeping these in mind, our solution consisted of three components working together in order to create a better overall education system to compliment the pre-recorded video lectures.

1. A ranking system- By creating a public ranking system, there are multiple benefits. The parent organisation(SimpliLearn in this case), can provide incentives to the top ranking students. The top rankers can request they're ranks to be put up in they're certificates. It will also create a competitive environment leading to better attempts and to take up more courses. Our ranking algorithm takes the following into consideration-
  i) % of completion of a course( i.e number of videos he watched)
 ii) Score of the multiple choice quiz he has to take at the end of the course
 iii) Number of questions and doubts(of others) he successfully answers in the discussion forum.
 iv)Number of upvotes of the questions he asks in the discussion forum.
  v)Number of projects done.

2. Real time in video doubt tagging - We want to establish the classroom environment to the fullest possible extent. In a classroom, a student can raise his hand at any point of the lecture and the techer will answer his doubt. This ability to interrupt the teacher and clarify his doubt ensures that he is not lost in the next part of the discussion. Since the videos are pre-recorded, and not a live webinar, it is impossible to achieve this in the current scenario. Our method of real time in video doubt tagging helps coming close to achieve this.
Using this, the viewer can pause a video at any time and ask a question with a click of a button.
The question is stored in our database along with its timestamp.

 The next time a different user watches the same video, a pop up at that particular timestamp shows up with the question asked. The second viewer can either choose to answer the question (if he has understood the concepts), or upvote the question so that another user maybe able to answer it. The viewer can also view the best answer if the question has already been answered via the discussion forums.

This creates a classroom environment simulation where doubts can be posted in real time and simulates a student raising his hand in class.


3. Our third and final component is in the direction of helping him implement what he has learnt in a project. We use geolocation and google maps javascript API to show the user, other users near him who have taken the same or different courses.

This way he can contact those users and they can work on a project together. The project done by them can be uploaded on his profile and would hence improve his ranking.



With these three components working together, our system will effectively improve the learning process and help simplilearn, as well as other educational video providing organisations, effectively ensure learning of the masses. The video doubt tagging provides a classroom environment. The geolocation provides oppurtunities to implement what he has learnt. And the ranking system keeps him in the loop and gives him a reason to learn further.

We were awarded the best Out of the Box idea prize by simplilearn and were given 15,000 indian rupees.

The languages used are HTML, CSS, PHP, javascript , AJAX, SQL and the only external API used is Google Maps javascript API.

The source code with instructions to use can be found here -
github repo


Please mention any feedback in the comments section below.