Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced on March 24, 2020, that the whole nation shifted from reality to a virtual world almost overnight. Office meetings, birthday celebrations, weddings and classrooms quickly adapted to the digital medium. Children's lives, especially, experienced a paradigm shift as their screentime increased exponentially. Parents had been worried about the increased fascination of their children with mobile phones and other digital devices, and the pandemic only aggravated those concerns.
On Safer Internet Day, Amitabh Kumar, Manish Tiwari, Ashish Jaiman and Sarada Prasanna Das came together to launch an android application named Wranga. While speaking to The Logical Indian, Kumar, one of the co-founders, defined Wranga as an ecosystem for digital parenting.
It is India's first platform as an app that seeks to provide Indian parents with a control and safety net on their child's digital consumption.
How Does The App Function?
Wranga App allows parents to watch the content ratings, reviews, and recommendations customized for their children before watching any movie or a show on any OTT platform. The co-founder mentioned that a committee of experts had reviewed the contents, and the app is enabled to flag issues within the game, show or movie, if any.
Kumar also explained to The Logical Indian, "We also have a practical advisory board helping parents in day-to-day parenting. As long as your child doesn't turn into an adult, Wranga is here to keep a check on the learnings they are receiving from their early childhood to puberty".
The Increasing Need For Wranga App
While explaining the need for the app, Kumar said, "Parents were worried because they saw their children spend hours glued to smartphones. The problem was quite clear, but nobody was giving a solution to approach it. Slowly, we realized that there is a big gap between digital migrants and digital natives". Digital migrants referred to parents and were unfamiliar with technology in their growing years. On the other hand, digital natives referred to their children, born and brought up in the age of technology.
With the growing demand for being technologically adept, Kumar said that there was no way parents could take technology away from their children. Still, they could regulate the use of technology. Therefore, they came up with the concept of 'Happy Table', which essentially meant balancing technology in a child's life. The founders strongly believe that 'children should use technology and not get used by it'.
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