Deshgori
Free, open-source, Bangla-first PWA that helps Bangladeshi migrant workers, students, and tourists verify official information and avoid recruitment fraud.
The Problem
Each year hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis migrate for work, and their remittances are a pillar of the economy — yet many are defrauded before they ever leave. Fake "free visas," broker (dalal) overcharging above the government cost ceiling, forged documents, passport confiscation, and lookalike sites impersonating government portals are routine. The missing skill is simple: knowing how to verify everything yourself on official government sites before paying.
What I Built
A static-first, offline-capable Progressive Web App that teaches verification in plain Bangla. Three guided tracks — labour worker, student, and tourist — walk users through tappable card lessons and retriable quizzes, ending in a client-rendered educational certificate clearly marked as not a government document. A separate emergency hub (/joruri) puts verified official hotlines and self-verification portals on one offline, one-tap screen, each shown with its real government domain to build anti-scam "domain literacy," plus a printable black-and-white sheet and a QR poster for mosques and tea-stalls. Every official link comes from a single registry-as-source-of-truth (data/links.json) of 19 verified hotlines and portals, re-verified on a schedule via CI — no government URL is ever hardcoded in the site.
Key Engineering Decisions
- Static-first, zero-backend PWA (Next.js static export plus a framework-free build-time HTML generator) that deploys to any static host — Cloudflare Pages or otherwise — for near-zero running cost
- Privacy by design: zero PII, no login, no accounts, no server, and no third-party analytics — all state stays local to the device
- Registry-as-single-source-of-truth: 19 official links and hotlines live in one data file, re-verified monthly by a scheduled CI job, so no government URL is ever hardcoded or left to drift out of date
- Built for the real world: a sub-100 KB page budget that works offline on low-end Android over 3G, with a 100/100/100/100 Lighthouse score and ~1.1 s LCP on the emergency hub
- Anti-scam by teaching domain literacy — every official destination is shown with its real government domain so users learn to recognise the lookalike scam clones themselves
- SEO/AEO pages and an llms.txt so search engines and AI assistants surface accurate, honest guidance instead of the ad-farms and scam clones that currently win these queries
Note: A Digital Public Good candidate: open license, zero PII, platform-independent, and documented — aligned with UN SDGs 10.7 (safe, orderly migration), 8.7 and 8.8 (decent work and migrant labour rights), and 4 (education). Designed as public infrastructure that complements the state and never impersonates it.
Stack
License: Apache-2.0 · open source