The youth who mapped his province's crisis
How a 21-year-old student used data and local knowledge to build a real-time fuel map for Uttaradit during fuel crisis.
- English
- ไทย
At first glance, Palathip "Chel" Pimsuwan looks like any other young man from a small town. He wakes up early, goes to class, then heads straight to a part-time job that keeps him out until midnight. He is twenty-one years old, pays for his own fuel, and has been working since he was a teenager.
But Chel is not an ordinary student. In March this year, when a global fuel shortage sent prices surging, the panic reached Uttaradit quickly. Petrol began to disappear from stations across the province. For Chel, a motorcyclist from Tron district who delivered food for an app-based service and on peak days would ride up to 250 kilometres, the crisis was immediate and personal — every job burned through fuel he could not easily replace.
By March 16, queues had formed outside stations across the province. In town, cars and motorbikes snaked around corners. Outside of town, the queues looked different: rows of jerrycans lined up on the ground, because farmers and fishermen needed fuel for tractors, water pumps, and boats — not cars.
Chel recalled having to cancel a delivery because he could not find a single station with fuel anywhere outside the city — and wondering whether things in his own province had really come to that.
Chel is a member of UNICEF Thailand's Young People's Advisory Board (YPAB) 2025–2026, a group charged with bringing youth perspectives into decisions that affect children and communities across the country.
He was not the only one asking about the fuel crisis. The "Uttaradit Baan Rao" Facebook group — its name meaning, simply, “Uttaradit our home” — was filling up with the same question: which stations still have fuel, what type, and how much is left. Everyone had the same need and nobody had the answer.
Watching everyone post the same desperate questions in online forums every few minutes, Chel felt the pull to act. "I kept thinking — what can I actually contribute here?" he said. "This was my chance to use what I know for something that mattered to everyone."
On the night of March 17, he sat down and built a Google My Maps platform showing station locations, fuel types, and live availability by colour code. It took him a single evening. The platform went viral after a local politician shared it the following morning, and a LINE OpenChat group soon followed, growing to 900 members sharing and reporting conditions in real time.
The improvised solution was invaluable for a crucial week. Then, on March 24, the central government launched PumpRadar, a nationwide fuel-tracking tool. Although Chel had started first, he shut his system down the next day. Some people asked for it back — a national platform covering every province, it turned out, was not quite the same as one built for Uttaradit alone — but Chel felt an official, integrated system was more sustainable.
What the experience taught him was that someone like him — passionate about data and geography, and driven by a genuine desire to help — could build something that mattered, quickly, with almost nothing. It is no surprise that he already has two more projects in mind.
The first is a public transport map for the province, pulling together around 20 routes from the municipality run by private operators onto a single platform that currently does not exist. The second draws on his academic training in Geoinformatics Technology at Uttaradit Rajabhat University: a flood-prediction tool using simulation models to trace how water moves across the province's shifting terrain. Uttaradit floods every year, but rarely in the same place twice.
He would like, eventually, to work for organizations like GISTDA – the Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency. It is an ambitious goal for someone who will spend this June finishing his restaurant shift at midnight before class at eight the next morning. But for a YPAB member who once built a province-wide crisis platform between delivery runs, ambition has never seemed to be the problem.
