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

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