Thu, 25 Apr, 2024

Technology Series: Batti Gayo!

By Nikita Gautam

In recent years, Nepal has been continuously facing the problem loadshedding, otherwise known as not having electricity for several hours during the day or night. Due to this, the Nepal Electricity Department (Nepal Bidhut Pradhikaran) started launching an official notice with the division of load shedding schedule within certain areas all over Nepal. Although there were different techniques through which one could have easily accessed the load shedding schedule, it became a tedious task to access valid schedules because of continuous and sudden change in the schedules. There are tremendous numbers of utility applications available in the market, but amongst them only those, which are innovative as well as qualitative, survives the race. To solve the problem of traditional way of photocopying the load shedding schedule every time, two software developers developed an application called "Batti Gayo". Chandraman Shrestha and his wife Elija Shrestha with their team of developers called "Last Door Solutions" came up with this app. It is a utility app that runs on iOS platform. The requirements for this application to run on the iOS devices are iOS 4.3, and are compatible with iPhone, iPod and iPad as well. The app’s user-friendly interface has made it really easy to get continuous push notifications ahead of losing electricity. One can manage group and alert systems in this application. There is a FLASHLIGHT enabling system embedded in the application, so as to light ones’ way during the load shedding. “Alert Time” feature is also a unique feature. It provides users an alert notification beforehand like an alarm, and it can be set by the user. ‘Batti Gayo!’ is one of the few apps available in the iOS platform. However, the same set of developers came up with Nepal Load Shedding Schedule designed for Android Platform. Users of this application believe that it has reached popularity in a short period of time because of its unique name, which means “Electricity is gone”. Creative concept, design and functionality are the key ingredients for the success of an application. Moreover, innovative idea is all that matters the most. This is one good example of the impact of software development in today's world. The immense development of software manufacture in Nepal has created a vast impact in facilitating the general public’s life.