So, when the youngster returned home, she was determined to rectify this problem. It's no secret that tourist spots in India have little information available for visitors. This has led to a parallel industry of guides who harangue people to hire them for a cost. Khanna's idea was thus to build an app that acts as a virtual source of information about some of the country's most-visited places. She started by building a prototype for it, before approaching investors, building a business model, and hiring a team of people — all of them students — spread across seven cities. And that's how India Story came about.

Humayun's Tomb

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I tried the app out and found it to be an earnest effort at documenting monuments and ancient Indian structures. The first thing that struck me is its simple, user-friendly layout. You pick a city of your choice before being led to certain historic places located there. Then, after you choose one, you are led to a map with different spots that are marked by indicators. Click on one, and there's an audio file containing a concise history about that particular structure. For instance, the one on Humayun's Tomb reveals how — even though the Taj Mahal is widely regarded as the first mausoleum built for love — it was in fact Humayun's older and, ironically, less-preferred wife who built this magnificent representation of Persian architecture for her late husband, much before the Taj Mahal was constructed.

Avantika Khanna

The app is a work in progress. But Khanna tells us that the plan is to add more places and tie up with heritage walk organisers to offer a more comprehensive experience. What's refreshing about the endeavour is that the students who narrate the audio files have a certain earnestness in their delivery which makes it endearing. And what's even more encouraging is that a bunch of teenagers have shouldered a responsibility that, ideally, the government and related authorities should have taken up in a bigger way much earlier.

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