MyMartyr.com / MeraShaheed.com - Supporting Indian Soldiers : Can we pull this off?

Yet another attack on India and 7 Indian soldiers have given up their life in the line of duty. All of us are grateful to the soldiers and struggle to hold back our emotions on seeing the family members perform the last rites.I am sure the Ministry of Defence and the respective units have financial policies to support the family of a Martyr. However, given the advances we have made in social, mobile and e-commerce space, we may be ready to put in place a social mechanism / platform to support the family of the Martyrs, beyond what is already available.

Some initial ideas here. We can refine the ideas further and realize this through network effects.

Why we need this platform?

1. Support the family and children of the martyr on a longer term basis.
2. Provide a chance to contribute financially. 
3. Provide a platform to secure contributions from Corporates / HNIs / NRIs and other likely contributors to funnel.
   • Example Use Case 1: A corporate could decide that a % of their profits for a defined month will be directed to this platform.
   • Example Use Case 2: An ace investor, could earmark, a % of the pool of his / her contribution to this platform.
   • Example Use Case 3: A prominent Life insurance player could match / share the burden of creating a corpus for a named child of a Martyr.

Core Functions of the proposed platform could be:

1. On-boarding of martyr’s profile within 3-6 hours of the soldier passing away in line of duty. Profile would include elements like: family (survived by), achievements, personal likes, bank account details etc. Time is of essence here and we can envisage tight SLAs. This could also include a ‘wall’ for comments by contributors and others. A Martyr’s children may actually read what India said about their father (typically, when they grow up - most front line officers are young with very young children).
2. On-boarding of contributors: A simple registration / enrollment process. This is quite vanilla.
3. Follow your martyr’s family: Periodic updates can be envisaged whereby progress of family , especially children can be shared on the platform.
4. Raise a request: Platform should have the capability for an authenticated family member to ‘raise a request to support’. The request should be disseminated to contributors in specific and social platforms in general.
5. Connected Peers: Empanel a few, e.g. five other officers of the Martyr, who can be tagged to a Martyr’s family. These ‘peers’ could raise request / assist the family (on the ground support).
6. Payments:
   • Accept payments from various products (IMPS, NEFT, Cards). International payments can be accepted from e.g. PayPal etc. Gateways, I am sure will process without any charges.
   • Provide for a small amount recurring payment (ECS), including as low as INR 50 or 100 etc. We need not underestimate the power of crowd funding.
   • Options to ‘Pay to Pool’ (amount shared and credited to all Martyrs equally on a periodic basis e.g. monthly) or ‘Pay to a named Martyr’. The pool of money may be ‘zeroized’ through outbound transfers to Martyrs family accounts. A bank can also be empanelled to support funds handling (i.e. cash management) and even support cash / cheque acceptance through customized deposit slips.
   • Easy app to be available to enable mobile based end to end support.
   • Synthetic structures can also be envisaged. e.g. where amounts received are large, amounts above a certain limit may be transferred to prior pools e.g. Kargil Martyrs pool. The options can be many, limited only by imagination and sincerity of purpose.
7. Reporting & Statistics: Information about amounts received, distributed and if possible some feedback from family members can help regularly demonstrate ‘outcomes’ achieved. Media can help in outreach creating strong network effects.
8. Privacy: Platform should look to mask all personally identifiable information (PII) of the family.
9. Extend: If the model is successful, it could be extended to police and others forces that protect us from internal threats.

Credibility can be achieved by embedding two aspects:

1. Alignment with right sub-team (e.g. NSG etc.) through Ministry of Defence.
2. This platform should be run and maintained by a respectable media house or by an e-commerce outfit e.g. Flipkart / Quikr, or both. Central government can support with exemptions and incentives as required.

 The above are only initial ideas. I am sure there are more aspects to add / modify / refine. If we could, through this ideation, inspire a corporate to pick this up we may have truly paid our respects to our soldiers. Please share comments and also hit ‘like’. Let’s try.