NASSCOM Foundation today announced the winners of its second annual Nasscom Social Innovation Honours 2010. The Honours were given to deserving projects that strive to bring about social change and development through technology at the NASSCOM India Leadership Summit 2010. The Honours were judged by an eminent jury of Narayana Murthy (Founder-Chairman, Infosys Technologies Limited), T. N. Ninan (Chairman and Editorial Director, Business Standard Ltd.), Rama Bijapurkar (Independent Market Strategy Consultant), Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao (Chairman, NASSCOM Foundation) and Saurabh Srivastava (Trustee, NASSCOM Foundation).
The Honours were given in the following categories:
ICT Led Innovation By Non-Profits
Health Management and Research Institute (HMRI) won the Honours for its unique means of reaching at-risk rural populations is HMRI's 24x7 health helpline - 104 Advice. This health contact centre offers non-emergency medical advice, information and counselling services on the toll free '104' number. Assisted by pre-formatted algorithms and disease summaries, callers are matched with appropriately qualified health workers (including medical specialty experts) who provide advice/counselling or make preliminary diagnoses and referrals for further treatment.
ICT Led Innovation Through Corporate Social Responsibility
a. Iris Business Services Pvt. Ltd. won the Honour for creating an internet based voting mechanism through which children in the schools of Navi Mumbai could vote for the candidate of their choice from amongst those standing for elections, IRIS succeeded in generating interest and debate amongst the students. The process mimicked real life: each class had a class Electoral officer appointed by the Class teacher or the civics teacher who was given the responsibility of getting students enrolled as voters.
This election was given media coverage and to spread the word, voting happened through a link on the NMTV website. The interschool voting competition with prizes for highest voter turnout and certificates for all 'responsible voting citizens' generated further enthusiasm and response among the students. The solution was available in both English and Marathi.
b. Multi Commodity Exchange of India Limited, won the Honour for it's Public Private Partnership (PPP) with India Post - MCX's Gramin Suvidha Kendra (GSK) entered into partnerships with various organizations to bring a gamut of services under a single window ranging from - price/market information, addressing technical queries regarding farming, providing scientific warehousing facilities, issuing warehouse receipts and credit lending, supplying quality agri and non-agri inputs, providing a platform for spot trading, and weather insurance services. By involving local people in the value chain GSK represents a collaborative approach that is vital when tackling pressing social problems. This low cost, revenue generating, sustainable model has the necessary flexibility for more services to be added, and is easily replicable.
c. Steria (India) Ltd., won the Honour for its 'community model' which engages a child right from his early school days in primary school, through middle school on to senior school and beyond. With facilities such as computer centres, libraries, morning milk and play areas, self learning English language software, theatre clubs, vocational skills and mentorship and so on an effort to provide a "Superior School Experience" for all round development of the child is put in place. Bright and ambitious kids also have the opportunity to benefit from the Steria India Foundation Graduate Scholarship Scheme (SIFGSS) that provides financial assistance for pursuing a university degree.
d. ITC Limited, won the Honour for coming up with viable options in the area of social and farm forestry. After investing in R&D, they came up with BCM clones that not only grow faster, are disease resistant, require less water but also has 3-4 times more productivity under rain fed condition and 6-7 times under irrigated conditions. This made ITC forestry programme a commercially viable option for farmers and communities. In the area of watershed development, a unique PPP model was used wherein the scale and resources of the government, community mobilization skills of NGOs and the management skills of ITC together provided higher wealth generation capability to the beneficiaries and achieved a larger scale operation. In the area of waste recycling, ITC provides special bags to accumulate dry waste like paper, plastic and metals and arranges periodic collection through outsourced agencies. Waste paper is used by ITC to manufacture paperboards and other materials are sold to recycling industries.
ICT led business innovation for development
a. Educomp Solutions Ltd. won the Honour for its teaching-learning paradigm in schools across India; offering interventions, products and services to teach children in the language they understand and with multimedia that brings alive abstract curricular concepts. With the introduction of MagiKeys Software, Educomp has enabled 'Online' / 'Offline' ICT usage in different languages like English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Konkani, Punjabi and Sanskrit. By developing training modules to help understand technology as a tool for imparting knowledge, Educomp lends teachers handholding support and quality training to use it effectively in the classroom. It's Build-Own-Operate-Transfer (BOOT) Model is designed to help State Governments increase their achievement of targets by investing initially minimal resources.
b. Geodesic Ltd. won the Honour for GeoAmida, the Perfect Last Mile to reach the Un-reached, enabling service providers to biometrically identify customers, deliver multiple services remotely & securely, and functions reliably in the remotest parts of the world. The multilingual, graphical interface (display, print & speak) is designed to address low IT literacy of the users & fundamentally improve ease of use.
c. TATA Consultancy Services won the Honour for mKRISHI. An innovative end-to-end platform involving mobile phones with camera, automatic weather station, sensors, mobile user interface software, server software and connectivity to information sources such as weather prediction applications, current commodity price feeds etc. which gives personalized services to farmers by collating the soil, crop and micro climatic data of any land, allowing experts to provide advice on any aspect of farming (such as soil conservation, fertilizer input, pesticide and crop health) on their mobile phone. It allows farmers throughout India to make a query in a local language from a mobile phone and receive personalized advice from experts in the local language.
ICT led e-governance innovation
a. District Administration, Kolhapur, won the Honour for "SAVE THE BABY GIRL". Through the district administration, malpractices of sex-determination and selective abortion that are major reasons for this gender imbalance in the region are tackled. Through creation of its website www.savethebabygirl.com & its online entry software, the administration tracks all sonography tests done across all authorized centers in a District. This monitoring mechanism gives the district administration an effective means to stop the malpractice of aborting the girl fetus. The program also provides economic support to pregnant women for the period of pregnancy, and encourages adoption of female fetus and girls by providing them economic security.
b. District Health Society, Baghpat and JP Nagar - U.P, won the Honour for Aarogyam, an end-to-end community based digital health mapping programme. The innovative use of IVRS and telecommunication technology devolves automatic call alerts/sms (in Hindi) with respect to specific family related information, on all aspects of child immunization, antenatal care, care of pregnant mothers, safe delivery, (Janani Suraksha Yojana), thereby ensuring health for the entire family with special focus on infant and pregnant/lactating mothers.Its pro-active model provides a sitting-at-home dial-up facility for full knowledge of one's family health profile. Being a two-way Interactive Health model, the project also informs the family about various health parameters if they enquire on in-dial phone numbers. The Reactive model of the project provides complaint registration facilities to citizens through voice recording mechanisms on in-dial phone lines. The best part is involvement and accountability of service delivery providers - by informing the medical staff from time to time about the lapses in their service delivery through automatic call alerts/sms.
c. Information & Public Relations Department, Orissa, won the Honour for e-Despatch. Itaddresses the challenge of facilitating instant communication of letters with zero fault and still retain the government process of letter dispatch intact. It ensures government signed letters reach its recipient in real time via, email, fax, SMS & e-Space. This solution helps in fastening the dispatch process & also avoids error due to human intervention. It also serves as an effective knowledge management repository.
d. Jhansi Jan Suvidha Kendra, Jhansi- U.P., won the Honour for its approach in the arena of public grievance redressing, through which citizens can approach concerned government officials and register grievances through mobile or land line phones. This can be done from anywhere in the district at anytime and the citizens get a quick and effective response/disposal of their grievances registered through call/SMS/Internet. This free-of-cost service is not just easily accessible for registering complaints, but also ensures effective tracking of the complaints by constant follow up with the concerned officer and citizen and intimating the citizen of the status.
In Multi Stakeholder Partnership
a. Ekgaon Technologies Pvt. Ltd. won the Honour for Monitoring Entitlements for Rural Communities (MERComs) which is a mobile phone-based monitoring system for tracking delivery of social welfare programme entitlements to rural poor. MERComs' service framework provides a way to efficiently aggregate monthly update of data in real-time from paper-based records of the beneficiaries in the field using mobile phones.
MERComs's Management Information System is modular, expandable and localized (in English, Hindi, Oriya) for NGOs, INGOs and volunteers for monitoring entitlements delivery to rural poor. This system monitors entitlement of the rural communities as given through identified government programmes to reduce corruption and help increase access to services to them who have not been covered under the programmes due to lack of access to "updated" information. Thus creating a system to ensure compliance of service delivery, reduce corruption and work towards building a system for a real-time access to services to beneficiaries with 100% transparency.
b. Swanchetan Society for Mental Health won the Honour for setting up a 24-hour counselling service run by clinical psychologists that reaches out to victims and their families providing support in the worst hour of their lives.
Environment
a. India Water Portal (http://indiawaterportal.org) won the Honour for its collaborative effort with participation from numerous NGOs, government institutions, corporate, universities and individuals. It is a completely free and open platform, for the dissemination of knowledge, and discussion/debate on water issues. The portal contains more than 1200 'knowledge levers' in the forms of case studies, slide shows, movies, courses, interviews, talks, policy documents, etc. covering the range of water-related topics. The commitment to reduce both the digital and the content asymmetry prevalent in India has been balanced on IWP through the emphasis on Indian language portals, Multimedia courses and Radio programmes. Some of these include Hindi and Kannada pages, 'Ask the experts' service and the Schools Water Portal.
b. Peer Water Exchange (PWX) won the award for its Web 2.0, social entrepreneurship project that transforms the philanthropic process from funding to long-term impact. PWX fosters and enforces collaboration among water project sponsors and implementers to aggregate and facilitate many diverse approaches, solutions, and resources to solve the global water and sanitation crisis. An efficient, decentralized network of partners that can be scaled up without a bureaucracy, PWX is the platform that can transparently, efficiently, and effectively manage the tens of thousands of grassroots projects needed to provide hundreds of millions of people with life-giving water.
