Winners of the NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours 2013

Since 2008, NASSCOM Foundation, the social development arm of NASSCOM, India’s industry body for the IT-BPM sector, has hosted the NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours (NSIH) to reward ICT social innovations across public, private, and NGO sectors that promote inclusive and sustainable growth in India. This year's awards were presented to 10 most innovative initiatives from over 300 entries from all across the country, in February at the Grand Finale in Mumbai.

Apart from the humongous amount of visibility that the prestigious award gives to the winners of NSIH, awardees also receive the opportunity to network and interact with industry leaders of the IT-BPM sector. After the competition, winners continue to receive opportunities to receive additional training, funding, and opportunities to interact with a vast network of past winners. Below, we recap the winners of NSIH 2013 and the social innovations that continue to make India a more equal and inclusive society.

Award Category: Social Innovation by a Government Body

SAKSHAM Scholarship Management System, National Informatics Centre, Lucknow – SAKSHAM is a project that aims to provide equality of education to children at all levels of society by providing a first of its kind electronic transfer of scholarships to the bank accounts of beneficiaries. The system manages the scholarship from primary stage to the point that the student achieves professional qualifications.

Award Category: ICT Led Social Innovation by a Corporate (CSR or Responsible Business)

YES Money Domestic Remittance Service, YES Bank – YES Bank has developed YES MONEY to reduce the burden of sending remittances for migrant workers in cities. The bank has realigned its existing infrastructure of Banking Correspondent Agents and leveraged the NEFT technology platform to ease the process of allowing depositors to send remittances to any of the 85,000 branches across the country.

Award Category: ICT Led Social Innovation by a Social Enterprise

Okekey, Eko India Financial Services Pvt Ltd – Eko has developed a mobile phone based transaction process to address the difficulty that individuals with low literacy levels have in accessing financial services. Their innovation makes it only necessary for individuals to be number literate, and provides a high level of security and affordability, and has helped expand financial services to the unbanked in some of the poorest regions of the country, impacting over 15 lac individuals to date.

Certificate of Appreciation

Zaya Education Micro Clouds (Formerly Teach a Class) – Zaya and NOMADEDU have developed a wireless education micro-cloud that serves as a sort of Dropbox for educational content, expanding the reach of education materials to the remotest areas. NOMADEDU servers create education hotspots so that education content can be delivered to areas without internet access; only access to electricity is required.

Award Category: ICT Led Social Innovation by a Not For Profit Organization, Certificate of Appreciation

Homelink, Don Bosco Young at Risk Forum – The Donco Bosco Young at Risk Forum has developed Homelink as a way to track the thousands of children at risk in India. The web based software tool is a platform for data management, monitoring, and reporting of care, protection and development of children throughout the country, to enhance the efficiency and efficacy of service delivery for children at risk.

Award Category: ICT Led Social Innovation by an Individual or Group

Stipator, Anuj Jain, Ratnesh Desai, Richa Yadav and Sivaraman Krishnan – Stipator has developed a mobile app that aims to provide a sense of security to the millions of women that must rely on public transportation to commute, often alone and late at night. The app allows the commuters friends and family to track them on the road and provides users with an SOS feature that sends an emergency message to a preset contact with a single click.

Certificate of Appreciation

Mango Reader, Jagdish Repaswal – Mango Reader has created an interactive online and mobile learning platform designed to provide the next generation of reading content for teachers to engage their students. The company is working to build an ecosystem where publishers, authors, educators, instructors, and content curators can create and share learning material using a cloud based platform to ensure access in even the most remote areas.

Award Category: ICT Led Social Innovation by a Multi Stakeholder Partnership

Livelihood 360, Concept Waves Software Solutions and Naandi Foundation – Concept Waves Software Solutions has developed, Livelihoods 360, a comprehensive produce management technology to help farmers maximize efficiency and receive the best prices for their crops. The solution, which has been adopted by over 12,000 farmers across 658 villages, uses a basic mobile device to capture yield estimates, crop collection and payments made to farmers and communicate them to a central server.

Award Category: ICT Led Social Innovation Concept by a Student

The D Labs, Devesh Kumar, Deepali Sinham, Amit Kumar Sharma, and Abhishek Kumar, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra (Deoghar Campus) – The D Labs is a software and eye tracking hardware combination that addresses the challenges of dyslexic children by tracking and analysing everything a child is doing while engaging in reading or writing. The D Labs then creates a bundle of applications to make learning more interactive, and communicates the data to the child’s parents and doctors to aid in the diagnosis process at a very early stage.

Award Category: UNICEF Special Recognition Award – ‘Innovation for Children’

IVRS based Daily Monitoring System of Mid-Day Meal Scheme, U.P. - The Mid-Day Meal Scheme is a process to track real-time data collected across 1,50,000 schools across U.P. on a daily basis. The process marks a major advancement in data collection for large scale government programs and has led to a dramatic increase in the number of schools serving meals to their students in the past two years.

Find out more about NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours and how you can take part in next year’s competition.

Note: YourStory.in is the ‘Media Partners’ for NASSCOM Social Innovation Honors 2013.