Do you know the helpline for Fire Brigade? Any idea who to call when your car gets towed while you were busy shopping at the mall? No? Probably most of us don’t either. There should be a better way than Googling and trying out random numbers, right? Well, that’s exactly the pitch of Team Siren.

Siren app is an all-in-one emergency portal that wants to be there for you when you are in a crisis. From instantly calling an ambulance to finding the helpline for your district’s police station, it hopes to do it all. How does it work? Download the app and sign up using details like name, phone number, city etc. You can also add another person’s contacts as In Case of Emergency (ICE).

The home page shows a blinking button which if slid, will take you to a screen showing your location and nine emergency contacts. Plus, there is a directory of relevant numbers - such as Edhi ambulance, Cyber Rescue or railway enquiry among others - which you can call there and then. The app is bilingual and also shows your history of emergencies.

The app is actually a product of Hysab Kytab - a fintech that lets you manage your income and savings among other things - which in turn is owned by Jaffer Business Systems, an IT solutions and data company under the banner of Jaffer Group. It’s headed by Yasir Ilyas - a US return with experience in IT advisory and business process automation in organisations like KPMG and IKEA - and Javeria Haseeb as co-founder and marketing lead. .

“I grew up in the US where 911 is the first point of reference in an emergency, but here there was no such product. We could either copy their way or build something better from scratch using the technology at our disposal,” the country head recalls.

“At the very least, we wanted to build a directory that showed you all relevant numbers you can directly call, based on your location. So the contact list available to you in Karachi would be different from the one to a user in Lahore,” he further explains.

Let’s talk money now, which becomes tricky since an emergency portal should be a public service. What’s the income stream? “The product is free for everyone to use and we want to keep it that way,” says Ilyas.

Is that just the new way of doing business or am I being too conservative? “From our end, it’s still more of a corporate social responsibility project but if we take Siren beyond our borders, to other developing countries where again the same gap exists, there obviously it will be a paid service,” he adds.

Moreover, Ilyas hopes to garner some monetary (or otherwise) support from the corporate sector, where Siren could be a potential channel for other entities’ investments.

The director is also looking for any sort of collaboration with government agencies but thanks to bureaucratic red tape, things have been a bit slow on that front. “We met former interior minister Shahryar Afridi and connected with the Safe City Project and are trying to get things moving there,” says Ilyas.

“In the meantime, we also approached the commissioner of Karachi and showed him the app, who loved this idea and told us about the call centre they run (1299) for all kinds of crises. Since there was no automation at their end, he wanted to partner with us and cover that end for the city,” he adds.

“We have already done the deployment and integrations at the backend and it just has to be operationalised from their side,” says Haseeb.

The app is still quite new without much user traction, which raises the question over its utility as a public platform. “At the moment, we are trying to sort out the operational aspects and cover the supply side by bringing in relevant authorities. Once that is covered, we will move towards customer acquisition, hopefully by first quarter of next year,” she adds.

They are also venturing into an area where it will have access to extremely sensitive data so what’s their policy about that? “We obviously have end-to-end encryption and are General Data Protection Regulation-compliant (a comprehensive set of binding standards put in place by the European Union last year to be followed by companies operating on the continent),” Ilyas explains. Furthermore, he claims that they are willing to locally store data on-premises when working with state agencies, such as 1299.

But what’s more important than any financial metric or future source of revenue is whether privatisation of a public good even desirable in the first place? After all, doing so gives empowers a commercial entity to decide on the provision of a necessity.

Even otherwise, the influence big tech has gained in developed countries has troubled policymakers (maybe except for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), which they have been largely unable to address. Perhaps too early to get into that debate when we barely have a technology sector, or maybe we should be smarter from the very beginning? Not in control to decide anyway.

The writer is member of staff:

m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, November 3rd, 2019