Affected by the dwindling population of the once integral post boxes, Bangalore software developer Thejesh GN has started the Open Post Box Project to map post boxes around India and making the data available virtually
Bangalore-based Thejesh GN, who is an avid traveller, likessending postcards to his friends and family whenever he visits a place. But this software developer has often struggled to find a post box to post his cards from. Bothered about the increasing fall in the number of post boxes, Thej (as he is fondly called) decided to do something about this situation and made up his mind to start mapping post boxes across the country and call it the Open Post Box Project “The idea is to map the post boxes across India on the map, so that users can find the post boxes around them wherever they are in the country.
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I started with Bangalore and hopefully will have contributions from all across India, since it’s a crowdsourced project,” says Thajesh.u00a0Till now the 32-year-old, who has Instagram as his medium, has mapped 59 post boxes (by clicking images of each and Instagram-ming them), mostly in Karnataka and a few in Delhi. “Instagram is a fun photo medium, which can also geotag (the process of adding geographical identification) the pictures. We have recently added Twitter as well. We are still testing it out,” he informs.
Thajesh, who uses the tag #openbangalore #postbox and #pin for the images and is looking for local volunteers to help him, wants to cover most of the tourist locations in India and the immediate challenge is to map 1000 post boxes after, which he plans to introduce a mobile application around this all India postbox data collection project.u00a0