Mumbai, 10th February, 2015: The NASSCOM Foundation has announced the winners of the ‘Technology for good’-themed – NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum awards for 2015.
Eleven projects were chosen from among over 1000 entries this year
Earlier known as the NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours, the program instituted by NASSCOM Foundation in 2008 has attracted a huge number of innovative projects from NGOs, corporates, social enterprises, Government departments, students and individuals, year on year. Over the years NASSCOM Foundation has established itself as a harbinger of change, driving technology for good through this program.
Going forward too, NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum will keep providing social innovators with not just a platform to showcase their innovations, but also with an opportunity to bring about a social change in our society through effective use of technology for good.
List of Awardees
ICT led Social Innovation by a ‘Not for Profit’ organization
Vidiyal – Led by K. Kamaraj, VIDIYAL and COL conducted a participatory rural appraisal that indicated a need for improved goat rearing and cow rearing practices. Through this L3F initiative, COL helped VIDIYAL establish a cooperative network amongst various agricultural and veterinary universities in India to provide women with the knowledge and business skills necessary for goat rearing and cow rearing microenterprises. Using multimedia materials in local languages, VIDIYAL trained 300 women to conduct value chain analysis and trained to develop business proposals for their goat rearing and cow rearing enterprises.
ICT led Social Innovation by a Social Enterprise
Kriyate – Led by Sumit Dagar, SimplEye is a custom designed smartphone application with an easy to use Interface for the visually impaired. A voice narrates which element is put on screen. The user can interact with this element using simple gestures. For example, swiping up/down scrolls through the elements in order. Swiping left takes the user one step back. A single tap takes the user forward while a long press is for accessing options. A user can apply these gestures anywhere on the screen, freeing one from the need of seeing the display!
ICT led Social Innovation Concept by Students
SOS Device – Led by Piyush Agarwal, the IIT team at Delhi developed a Smart Gadget by which anyone especially kids, women, elderly in trouble/distress situations can reach out to their friends, family, concerned authorities with their GPS location by just tapping on it. This gadget has been developed to send notifications as S Messages to prefed numbers of family and friends by just tapping. The alarming messages can also be sent to the concerned authorities to take proper and necessary action. Ses will continue to be sent at short intervals once triggered so that the user in trouble could be easily tracked and located. Users can also assign places as safe zones so that notifications can be sent if the user leaves the designated areas described as safe zones. Family members, friends whose numbers are stored can also remotely track the location of the user by just sending a S.
ICT led Social Innovation by a Corporate (Responsible Business)
Lemon Tree hotels – Led by R Hari and Aradhana Lal This initiative solved to a large part the problem that employees at the hotel had who were speech and hearing impaired (90% of the 13% disabled employees). Information & Communication Technology played a vital role in designing and implementing. The hotel created visual aids that covers technical aspects of Housekeeping and F&B Service. They have also created their own dictionary, visual aids that carries picture and parallel demonstration by an sign language expert a picture and a video in the same frame.
Catalytic Grants for Early Stage Enterprises
Enability Technologies – Led by Pradeep Thangappan. One way to reinforce motor skills and improve gesture consistency is through practice in a game. Better compliance could be achieved if the game were made even more portable. In their unique system, data captured by the sensor are transmitted to a phone, thus allowing easy portability to the convenience of the child. The unique contribution of this system is that it harnesses existing motor capacity and movement in children to enable communication.
SkillTrain – Led by B Ganesh. There are nearly 15 million school kids who drop out of school education every year in India. SkillTrain uses mobile phone as an enabler in delivery vocational training to rural school dropouts. SkillTrain has developed video content that is playable on cheap mobile phones in rural areas. This has helped them deliver free video content to the school dropouts thereby enabling access to vocational training direct to their pockets without them spending a lot of money and effort in accessing them. Once vocational content was made available, the interest levels rose and dropouts came forward to learn skills and thereby become employable.
Tamana – led by Blessin Varkey. The team at Tamana took the work done by Microsoft on Kinect for autism. Tamana with IBM designed two applications to enhance the motor coordination, joint attention and cognition skills of children with autism and intellectual impairment. For the first set of trials 28 students participated, producing 88% acceptance and improved joint attention results. From comprehending the task to encouraging joint attention, the trial proved not only to be successful in ter of achieving goals but also showcased prolonged attention and improved socialization skills.
Certificates of Appreciation
Biocon Foundation – Led by Dr Suchitra Bajaj and Praveen Birur, the Biocon Foundation has developed and implemented a mobile phone based management platform for cancer screening and surveillance that enables the creation of electronic health records and facilitates targeted screening for Oral Cancer. The unique feature of the project is Electronic Data Capture (EDC).
Easy Gas, Dist administration Kanpur – Led by Dr Roshan Jacob, this innovation helps consumers of Easy Gas. The old system available was incapable of generating any kind of report where District Administration, Citizen etc can check the demand/supply/available stock of LPG. So Easy gas adopted a strategy to get the customer to pay a nominal amount and get an entitlement to getting that service. In EASYGAS, the software is able to allocate cylinders to the waiting list in a automatic, and therefore free and fair manner.
Sabrang Trust – Led by Teesta Setalvad and Chaitanya Muppala. There was felt to be an urgent need for a people driven, inclusive mechanism that works with technology to actively register signs of the buildup to violence and promptly and effective sets of a chain of interventions to prevent its escalation, a Peace Mapping Project. Social Media with its positive potential also has a negative side: it can accelerate rumour mongering, incite violence etc. It is proposed to link local communities through technology and innovative use of social media. The aim will be to actually log in warning signals that work as preventives. Once logged, these, then set off a whole initiative (HELPLINE) to help prevent the spiral of rumour mongering and its break out into violence. Response Syste that are in place will set to work when and if violence breaks out.
Frontier Markets – Led by Ajaita Shah, their system was designed to detect faults in operation of Solar Products like Lights, and inverters to reduce chances of theft, especially in the rural areas. This is monitored online through a remote server so service can be provided as a response. The SOLAR PRAHARI is a System Status Monitoring and Theft Protection device. They are able to track operations and outcomes real time, syncing each vertical’s operations effectively.
For a few days, we have a video on this NASSCOM outreach in our Tech Video Spot