Along the lines of Pepsi Refresh Project and GE’s Ecomagination Challenge comes Mahindra’s ‘Spark the Rise‘ Competition which is a digital challenge geared towards creating change through innovation. The campaign that is focused in India aims to get Indians to create innovative projects around six themes namely energy, transport, infrastructure, agriculture, technology and social entrepreneurship. The top ideas in each category get funding from Mahindra which is 12.8 billion dollar company and the largest automaker in India. According to the ‘Spark the Rise’ website – Each month, 8 Sparks will receive grants of 4 lakh each. In total, 48 Sparks will receive 1.92 crore over the course of 6 months. Five of these monthly winners will be selected by public vote. Of these, the 2 most-voted will be eligible to participate in the Grand Finale.

The competition received close to 1000 entries in the first round which were voted down to 8 top entries that range from a  smart irrigation automation solution to a design that prevents suicides using ceiling fans.  Mahindra is the first Indian multinational to leverage what is being called ‘movement marketing’, a term coined by Strawberry Frog that means creating awareness of the brand using various platforms and means of conversation with a group. Mahendra is also known for its Corporate Social Responsibility programs and has received the Pegasus Award for CSR in 2007.

Some interesting ideas that came out of the competition are:

Kisan Raja that is a smart irrigation automation solution and uses a GSM based remote controller to stop and start irrigation pumps.

Technology for green air conditioning and refrigeration system in vehicles that consumes negligible amount fuel with close to zero emissions.

A design that can lock any wheel of your car by a press of a switch and hence help get stuck vehicles out of slush by powering the rest of the wheels.

KPF Rainwater harvesting system that gathers large amounts of rainwater underground using a plastic sheet that acts as a conduit and allows the water to seep into the ground thereby adding to the groundwater.

Last but not the least, a project aimed at reducing suicides by the means of hanging from a ceiling fan by introducing a safety rod which gets extended when someone attempts to hang themselves.

Links referenced

Fastcompany Article
The Economic Times Article
Yahoo News Article

There are close to 850 million mobile subscribers in India. Mobile penetration in India is increasing every day but that does not come as a surprise. In the past we have looked into successes like Just Dial geared towards the urban Indian and innovations like MKrishi geared towards India’s rural population. We have also covered the use of mobile as a way to disperse the news in ‘Gaon ki Awaz’ and other initiatives like Movirtu that provide mobile services to people without a mobile phone.

Mobile innovation is not new to India and the developing world, and it is taking a life of its own now.  Mobile technology is personal, ubiquitous and ever-present. It can host radio shows, be used for education, control equipment remotely, move money from one place to another and start revolutions. Redefinition of these capabilities have to led to mobile and telecom sector giants like Nokia, Samsung and Mahendra to organize mobile contests in the country to get the youth thinking about mobile innovation and design.

Bhasha 2011 is a collaborative project between Nokia Research Center and four design colleges in India and is aimed to help the young Indians get more exposure to their native languages. With increasing number of young urban Indians choosing English over their vernacular tongue, this initiative is addressing a problem that needs a solution. Getting students to design such solutions is a great way of getting them solve a problem that they are aware of and identify with. This is also a great segway for the young designers to design for technology early on.

There are a couple of interesting ideas seem to come out in the process. One of them being ‘Pitara’ by Bangalore based students from Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology. The application is a continuously growing repository of stories in vernacular languages with a bilingual dictionary functionality to decipher the stories. The idea is to learn languages through stories and contribute your own.

‘Kaccha Limbu’ by another group of students from Shristi, allows migrant students to learn languages of the state they are going to be moving to, to complete their studies. They are guided by three virtual assistants that guide, correct and quiz the students as they move towards learning the language.

‘Vijeta’ is a location based social network game. The player arrives in a new territory and visits different location and people to learn new words and find his way around.

Vijeta

50 teams belonging to top design schools like Shristi School of Art, Design and Technology, National Institute to Design, Indian Institute of Technology and Symbiosis Institute of Design took part in this initiative.

Nokia had also organized the ‘Calling all Innovator Contest’ a couple of years back.   Couple of other interesting ideas that came out of that contest were the Nano Ganesh – an application that enables farmers to check availability of power to their irrigation systems. Similar to Nano Ganesh, Bangalore based Vinifet Technologies developed Kisan Raja a GSM based controller that allows farmers to control irrigation pumps using mobile phones or handsets. An IVRS (Interactive Voice Response System) in local languages helps in making selections for switching the motors on or off. Farmers also receive voice alerts for faulty power supplies, motors that do not start, lack of water in the well/bore, and attempts at device/motor theft. This project won the first runners up for the Samsung Innovation Quotient, which is a national talent hunt to recognize innovators from all parts of India.

Another concept that won the National Telecom Award for ‘Excellence in innovation with Rural Telecom Focus’ was Saral Rozgar. Saral Rozgar links job seekers and job providers through a common database that can be easily accessed through mobile phones. All the features for the application are voice activated in various languages which allows the workers in the informal sector of India access to the service. This the first time that industrial, part time and daily/weekly wage workers in the informal sector can access organized information about employment opportunities.

Another initiative by the veterans of Salesforce and Apple that caught my eye was mpowering. Mpowering works like foursquare where is low incoming communities are given mobile phones. If their children check into places like a ‘school’ by scanning a barcode, the family gets points which can later be exchanged for household goods, clothes and food. The organization partners with non profits in poor communities and tries to pull people out of poverty by using a rewards system. The idea is to get the poor to think about long term goals and not just short term necessities. The project is already doing good work in Orissa in partnership with Citta foundation.

As mobile penetration in India increases, more and more services are being developed for mobile distribution. The time is ripe for using mobile platforms to deliver a variety of services that include education, healthcare, agriculture, journalism, way-finding etc. Things that smart phone owners take for granted can create huge shifts in the lives of rural and BOP population in developing nations. The challenge is to develop these services for cheap feature phones and not just smart phones so that a larger user base can avail the services that these devices are capable of delivering and thereby facilitate large scale social change.

Additional Links

Learn local lingo using a mobile application

Green Phone and Nano Ganesh

Annual India report for Mobile innovation 2011

Fastcompany article on Mpowering

Mobile apps in rural India

Nokia’s idea project

Local language learning goes mobile

My parents live in a farm house in a town called Ambala in Haryana, India. When I visit them, I go on early morning walks with them, walking through the surrounding farms, villages, temples and gurudwaras. Along the way we run across farmers starting off their day, walking to their farms in dejection. During my visits, I often feel I have gone back in time and from the looks of it, it seems that the farming practices in India haven’t changed in years. The green revolution and the aggressive variety of crops that were grown in these farms in the last century have made the land incapable of growing  indigenous crops. As farmer suicides increase on a yearly basis, farming practices in India need addressing. Farmer issues have been raised in mass media and was most recently seen in a form of a black comedy movie called Peepli Live. I also watched another film called Harvest of Grief that dealt with the same issue at the Sikh Film festival last year. Indian farmers have limited access to information regarding farming advice. Questions like ‘Which pesticide will protect my crops’ often go unanswered and trial and error methods often costs the farmer money, crops and time.

Answering such questions and linking farmers to expert advice was the reason and inspiration behind mKRISHI, a platform developed by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The platform is two fold. It allows farmers to submit questions to agricultural experts using mobile phones and the experts get environment-specific details when the farmer enters his location on mKRISHI. The farmers are given mobile phones with special software to submit queries. This works for both low end and high end phones. The farmers can submit photographs with phones that have a cameras (as can be seen in the video above). The mKRISHI service costs a farmer between $1 to $2 per month. The experts, on the other hand, are sent updated agricultural metrics for a farmer’s land by sensor networks and a weather station in the village. This is made possible when the agricultural sensors connect to geo location services like GPS and Google Earth to deliver local weather, soil conditions, common pests and food grain prices. All of this information can be accessed by the expert through a web console where-in the expert can weigh in all the options and send back advice to the farmer by either text or voice message.

mKRISHI is working on creating a robust wireless sensor node so that every farmer can afford to install one node per one acre of land thus making crop disease forecasting more precise as data from the sensors powers the disease prediction model.  After a certain threshold is reached the farmers phone is triggered automatically so as to warn him to take measures to ensure a healthy crop cycle. TCS innovation labs is headed by Arun Pande and he is the force behind mKRISHI. In a Wall Street journal article, he says, ” In the absense of correct information and advice which is specific to him, the farmer relies on what other farmer do – or on his traditional wisdom.”

TCS launched mKRISHI in 2009 in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh where it now serves 500 farmers. There is a clear call to action to expand the service so that the service can positively help a lot more farmers and one such strategy is to partner with major IT companies. There is also talk of taking mKRISHI to other developing countries. For now it is concentrating it efforts in India and hoping that when a farmer needs help, there is always a helping hand out there to pull him out of doubt, questions or anything else that might be plaguing him. Thus making sure that farming is no longer a suicidal business in India and that, with the right tools it can be profitable and not just dependent on intuition and mother nature.

The WSJ Article

Fastcompany Article

Interview with Dr Arun Pande on Global Partner Network

A big percentage of indian village population is illiterate. Traditional mode  of transmitting news like newspapers are not effective for that demographic. Television as a medium to disseminate news are not effective in villages either because of unreliable electricity as well as the cost behind purchasing a TV unit. Transistor radios have been a cheap and accessible way of news dissemination for a long time now. However with mobile technology making its way into the heartlands of rural india, a project like Gaon Ki Awaaz was waiting to happen. Gaon Ki Awaaz is India’s first mobile news service. The service targets rural india.

The reports are transmitted in the local dialect which is Avhadi. The subscribers need to answer their phones in order to hear pre-recorded news messages. The news is related to local events happening around the village or villages close by, making the information relevant to the subscriber. Subject matter for the broadcasts can include other useful information like farming tips, healthcamps and government announcements etc. A news bulletin like this would hold the villagers attention and inform them about the happenings in and around their village.

The news is broadcast twice a day, at noon and 5pm. The village reporters record the bulletins which makes it way to the local editor and is then converted by the founder of the service into .wav files. These files are then sent to Netxcell, a company in Hyderabad for broadcast. The file is then sent out to the numbers of the subscribed villagers in the database.

The program is available to the villages at a nominal subscription cost of Rs 30 for three months. The other costs being MMS equipped phones for the two reporters and the local editor that cost about $100 each and the monthly broadcast fee. The number of users is over 250 subscribers and has spread over 20 villages. The project was launched by Sunil Saxena who is also the dean of International Media Institute of India and Satyendra Pratap, a journalist from Rampur.

The service is trying to bring in some revenue by using advertising which will be played in the beginning of the transmission. The plan is to start local advertising from agricultural companies and services that could actually benefit the user in the long run. According to the Gaon Ki Awaaz blog, the local village barber, tailor, internet cafe operator, coaching center owner and the village astrologer have advertised their services. In the true spirit of present day technologies the future plan is to make this service interactive by allowing the subscribers to not only receive news but also submit news updates. These updates would be then vetted by local editors and then added in to the reports. The idea is to enable the villagers to create an ecosystem of citizen reporting and generate reports relevant to them.

Recently Gaon Ki Awaaz was awarded the Manthan 2010 award in the e-news and media category. The project also won the mBillionth South Asia award in m-News and Journalism category last year. The future plans for the service include creating a self sustaining model and scaling this social venture by raising more capital to gear up for rapid growth to reach millions of villagers.

Also check out how ‘Gaon Ki Awaz’ is produced – Video

e-Chaupal, an agricultural e-business initiative by ITC, one of India’s larger conglomerates, offers rural farmers information, products and services to enhance farm productivity, improve farm-gate price realisation and cut transaction costs. It also facilitates supply of high quality farm inputs as well as purchase of commodities at their doorstep. Farmers can access latest local and global information on weather, scientific farming practices as well as market prices at the village itself through this web portal – all in Hindi and other local languages. EChaupal is designed to provide physical service support through a Chaupal Sanchalak – himself a lead farmer – who acts as the interface between computer terminal and the farmers.

More on e-Chaupal on the ITC site