My name is Hamshathvani Ananthan. I’m from Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I’m google map’s local guide since 2018. The most interesting thing I have done as a local guide is modifying my area in google maps.
In Moratuwa I live in a housing scheme area called ‘Soysapura’, even though my place is near the capital of the country, it didn’t have proper paths on google maps. Because of this most of the travellers, taxi drivers, and food delivery persons were facing many problems, sometimes for emergencies, ambulance and fire extinguisher services were unable to come to our place. That’s what I thought before upgrading the tourist spots and public places its essential to build up my residential area so there’ll be fewer problems like the above.
As a local guide, I started to fix this problem. So I created my apartment building ‘B6 - Soysapura Flats’ and named the road which comes to my apartment. After these got approved by the google maps, I started to add my neighbourhood apartments and nearby roads. Some common places in my housing scheme area like the bus stand, shops, and playgrounds were already in the google maps, so I added photos and wrote some reviews of that places. Now a small circle of the area near my home has been updated in a better way. I can see that my updates are useful for many people and I’m feeling happy about it.
Once when a fire accident happened in my neighbourhood, the fire service came fast as possible and they said that they found the place easily because of the google maps without any confusion. When I heard this I was overwhelmed with joy.
I hope soon that I can update my housing scheme area completely in a proper way. Let the community gets the maximum benefits with my updates as a local guide.
