Caminos
Verified · Feb 20261 min read
● projectDiscontinued · subnational · 2018

keralarescue.in: open crisis mapping platform for the 2018 Kerala floods

During the August 2018 Kerala floods, hundreds of volunteer developers built a crisis mapping and rescue coordination web platform and app.

Laptop screen showing lines of codeillustrative atlas image · Ilnur / Unsplash
IKIEEE Kerala Section y comunidad de desarrolladores voluntariosnetworkKSKerala State IT MissiongovernmentPVPinarayi VijayanABArnav Bansal
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01 The context

keralarescue.in (Django/Python, open source on GitHub from day 0) allowed registering rescue requests and locating shelters, camps, water levels and supplies. The Kerala government adopted it as its official site. ~1,500 technologists collaborated for free (some 69 in the main repo) and it received millions of requests. After the emergency the service stopped being maintained and the domain went inactive/for sale; the durable legacy is the open source repositories.

02 How it works

method · Crisis mappingmethod · Collaborative open source software developmentmethod · Crowdsourcingtool · Collaborative maps of shelters and water levelstool · GitHub (rescuekerala repos, MIT license)tool · keralarescue.in (Django/Python)

03 What it stands on

Evidence level
Own experience
Grounded in published theory
Documented evidence elsewhere
Independently evaluated here
Peer-reviewed research documents this project: the strongest evidence level in the atlas.
The evidence 2 ›
EvidenceLessons learned from deploying crowdsourced technology for disaster relief during Kerala floodsProcedia Computer Science 171 (Elsevier), pp. 2410-2419, ICCIDS 2020 · 2020
ContextBehind official Kerala rescue website are 1,500 techies working for freeThePrint · 2018

04 Lessons learned

The platform was built for a one-off emergency and was not sustained afterwards: the keralarescue.in domain went inactive and 'for sale' (parked, Sedo) in 2026. A double lesson: (1) civic disaster software needs a post-crisis maintenance and governance model, not just a volunteer sprint; (2) the durable value was not the service but the open source code on GitHub (rescuekerala repos, MIT license). Institutional sustainability, not technical sustainability, was the bottleneck.