TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS CREATING ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL BENEFITS -Jagadeesh Reddy Yaramada (G11022)

Introduction Sustainable development is development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs - World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987. In the 21st century poverty and natural constraints are two of the most important challenges humanity must contend with. Instead of seeing this as a problem companies across developed and developing countries started to transform these needs into opportunities. With increasing awareness to preserve the environment and natural resources for future generations, businesses, governments and civil societies have already started coming together to encourage new technology innovations to help the society and preserve environment. India is currently the worlds fourth largest economy in terms of real GDP (PPP) and the tenth largest economy in terms of nominal GDP. Over the last decade, the country has emerged as a leading actor on the international stage. In a situation where the world requires innovative companies to address the serious global challenges faced by humanity, including high resource consumption, pollution, population growth, demographic and geopolitical changes, India, with its rapidly changing business environment, may indeed prove to be one of the most important countries on the planet over the next several decades. Indian businesses have been going global through acquisitions over the past few years, as the resource availability is limited it is very important for businesses to Innovate to maximize the output and efficiency. However for innovations to have sustainable impact and to add business value, sustainability should be integrated with core business. In this paper I will present few technological innovations which integrated sustainable social development with the business strategy.

Farmers Application: Project mKrishi

Progress among rural communities is impeded by factors such as illiteracy, poor economic condition, and technological anxiety towards IT infrastructure and lack of connectivity to the sources of information. TCSs proprietary Mobile Agro Advisory System (mKrishi) provides farmers information on microclimate, local mandi (market) price, experts advice, and other information relevant to them, on a mobile phone even in local languages. This application enable farmers to send queries, comprising of text, voice and pictures, specific to their land and crop (transmitted through sensors) to agricultural experts, using 1

their mobile phones and the responses from experts are relayed back to farmers on their cell phones. mKrishi has enabled a whole community consisting of farmers and several rural stakeholders to connect and exchange information and services. Many agri input companies, rural banks, crop insurance companies, government and agriculture universities now find it easier and less costly to reach a group of or individual farmers. It creates a service delivery highway (platform) wherein the farmers, various stakeholders, government and agriculture research institutes (national / international) are all connected. This platform can evolve to add new services as and when needed or demanded. The service is provided at free of cost during the pilot phase and TCS is evolving a business model involving operators, local franchisees and subject matter experts. Different services would be bundled into categories, such as free, vanilla and premium, and charged accordingly. Pricing would be subsidised through ad revenues generated on cell phone. This application providing huge social benefits also enables TCS to earn significant revenues through operator sharing and subscriptions. Considering that there are 110 million farmers in India and if TCS charges $1 per month as subscription fee the application could generate revenue of $110 million to TCS. This application also creates a significant market for GPS-enabled 2 megapixel handsets. The application has won several awards including Wall Street Journal Global Innovation Technology Award in Wireless Category; Golden Peacock Award for Innovation; Indian Innovation Initiative (i3) award.

e-Choupal:
e-Choupal is a Hindi word which means village meeting place. Market is a meeting place where vendors and customers come together to do transactions. e-Choupal is a virtual market place where farmers can transact directly with a processor and can realize better price for their produce. The main disadvantage of conventional market is that information asymmetry is inherent in the market where as e-Choupal provides for transparent transactions. This enables the participation of smaller as well as larger players. Elimination of some layers of intermediaries allows for larger share of profits to reach the lower end of value chain. The main attractiveness of e-Choupal is that it can be used for connecting large producers/small producers and small users/large users, thereby eliminating the need for hierarchy of brokers. Internet is used as a low transaction cost backbone for communication. Physical delivery of produce to the processor is still done through the existing intermediaries The e-Choupal model has been specifically designed to tackle the challenges posed by the unique features of Indian agriculture, characterized by fragmented farms, weak infrastructure and the involvement of numerous intermediaries, who block critical market 2

information from passing to the farmers and use that information for getting a big margin for themselves. ITC sets up a back-up physical service support at the village level, called Choupal, through Sanchalak: a lead farmer, who acts as the interface between computer and the farmer. ITC accumulates information regarding weather, modern farming practices, and market prices from sources like Meteorological Department, Agri-universities,

mandis(regional market) etc., and uploads all information on to e-Choupal web site. All information is customized according to local farmers requirements and provided into the local language through computer set up by ITC in Sanchalaks house. Sanchalak access this information and facilitates its dissemination to farmers. Information regarding weather and scientific farming helps farmers to select the right crop and improve the productivity of their farms. Availability of market information helps farmers to become market oriented. The access to e-Choupal is provided at free of cost but the revenue from e-Choupal is generated through the savings both to farmers and ITC by direct transactions. Further ITCs market share in soybean processing industry increased in one year from 8% to 12%, reducing the difference with the market leader (20%). Before e-Choupal was launched, its market share was a constant 8% throughout the prior five years. The network of 6,500 e-Choupal centres spread across 40,000 villages in 10 states has emerged as the gateway of an expanding spectrum of commodities leaving farms wheat, rice, pulses, soya, maize, spices, coffee, aqua-products.

Arogya Ghar:
An initiative by Sustainable Innovations, this project aims at making medical knowledge, if not medical professionals, accessible to rural populations at a cost of $0.25 per visit which even the poor can afford. Aarogya is a walk-in clinic equipped with selfservice kiosks and computerized disease protocols, published by the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization. Kiosks will capture clinical (vitals, history, medication, diagnostics, drug names, manufacturers name) and demographic (name, age, unique health identifier or UHI) data. The data will be deposited into IIHMR repository. Patient can walk into the clinic without appointment; Kiosk assigns a unique health identifier (UHI) to the patient. The health worker enters the symptoms. Kiosk compares the symptoms with the knowledge-database of the common ailments. If there is a strong match, kiosk will display treatment plan. If the match is weak, Kiosk will prompt the health worker or nurse to capture additional symptoms. Kiosk will run a match again to either identify a disease or to reject. In case of rejection, the data will be sent to the back-up physician at IIHMR. Another novel feature of this project is that Local social entrepreneurs will build, operate and own (BOO) Arogya. With 6 8 week training at IIHMR, they can operate Kiosks. 3

Arogya has the ability to grow in both capability (number of ailments) and capacity (number of patients). The kiosk has been tested in rural areas of Rajasthan where access to proper medical services is scarce. In 2009, it was approved by the Asian Development Bank for a pilot project in China, and has been successful enough at curbing the spread of preventable diseases that USAID, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization are interested in possibly using the kiosks in 50 villages by 2012. Dr.BP Agrawal, President, Sustainable Innovations has been named recipient of the 2010 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability in recognition of his communitydriven rainwater harvesting system and mobile health clinics, which have the potential to improve the global public health system and better the quality of life for villagers in rural India.

Hole in the wall:

Minimally Invasive Education (popularly known as the Hole-in-the-Wall or HiWEL) is defined as a pedagogic method that uses the learning environment to generate an adequate level of motivation to induce learning in groups of children, with minimal, or no, intervention from adults. Children learn in an unsupervised environment where self-organization plays the most important role. This concept was, for the first time, brought into light in 1999 in an experiment conducted in Kalkaji, New Delhi. Dr. Sugata Mitra, Chief Scientist at NIIT, is credited with the discovery of Hole-in-the-Wall. As part of this project standalone computer kiosks are setup in remote villages and slumps where the access to formal education is very limited. These kiosks are designed to withstand abnormal weather conditions and also safety. Children are encouraged to learn through exploring on the kiosks with minimum adult support. As a concept, Hole-in-the-Wall has multiple dimensions and a potential which is virtually limitless. What it offers someone depends on the perspective one is looking from. For experts, like Nicholas Negroponte of MIT, Hole-in-the-Wall is a Shared Blackboard which children in underprivileged communities can collectively own and access, to express themselves, to learn, to explore together, and at some stage to even brainstorm and come up with exciting ideas. For villagers, it is more like a village well, where children assemble to draw knowledge and, in the process, engage in meaningful conversation and immersive learning activities that broaden their horizons. And finally for children, it is an extension of their playground where they can play together, teach each other new things, and more importantly, just be themselves. Currently, there are nearly 200 HiWEL learning stations comprising of two computers each across the length and breadth of India. These are situated in remote, rural and difficult

terrains; a few are in tribal areas and juvenile homes. Sarva Siksha Abhiyan, under Delhi Programme has set up 56 learning stations for out-of-school children in the year 2008. OneMIS (One Management Information System): Developed by EkGaon Technologies OneMIS is a mobile-based integrated openframework, a field based monitoring, transacting and real-time interaction system to address the service gap for Self Help Groups and other forms of Financial Institutions. OneMIS designed to help MFIs, banks and NGOs with Micro Finance programmes, with the main objective to reduce operating costs, streamline lending processes, broaden the product and service portfolios, scale rapidly, and integrate with other resources like credit bureaus, investors, banks, Financial Istuitutions and national and internation payment systems. The system faciliates the collection of financial information for rural SHGs/Groups and portrays it on an online server, to enable required stake holders to access the information from anywhere any time. OneMIS can be linked to various interfaces like mobile phones, smart phones and PDAs. OneMIS can be used for doorstep banking services through MFIs field officer and/or business correspondents. EkGaon ties up with banks and MFIs providing the application and training services to the field officers, any time a transaction is being made EkGaon will receive a fee. Considering the penetration of mobile phones in India, OneMIS can reach large number of rural population providing them with services related to banking and Micro Finance. EkGaon has made social empowerment part of its business strategy and is working several projects to help rural india. EkGaon won the NASSCOM Social Innovation Honours 2010 Multi Stake Holder Partnership and also won the Stock Challenge 2007 award. MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act): The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) is a landmark social security legislation that epitomises the right to employment on demand. It aims to enhance livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a year to every household. The Act spans 619 districts, 6400 Blocks, 6 lakh villages and around 2.35 lakh village Panchayats. Being a huge project and to cut the leaks in the system as the money transfers from the Government to the worker NREGA is using ICT Enabled Ecosystem coupled with Biometric system for attendance recording. Use of technology helps government in reducing the middlemen involvement with payments and also enables government to monitor the project transparently. There are several other initiatives government is working OneWorld using ICT technology.

Conclusion: From the above it is clear on how companies can use technology to innovate products that would help the bottom of pyramid population and still make economic. There are several other innovations by companies like Infosys, Wipro, Geodesic and HCL Technologies etc., which are trying to help customers and society by addressing social problems through sustainable innovations.

References:
Sachin Joshi, Seema Arora, Dennis Pamlin, Shirish Sinha (2008). Indian Companies with Solutions that the World Needs/ Sustainability as a Driver for Innovation and Profit. Retrieved August, 08, 2011 from http://www.pamlin.net/written/documents/WWF%20&%20CII%20%20sustainability%20as%20a%20driver%20for%20profit%20and%20innovation.pdf Mohammedd Saqib, The Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, Rajesh Sehgal and Dennis Pamlin, WWF. Indian Companies in the 21st Century. Retrieved August, 08, 2011 from http://www.wwf.dk/dk/Service/Bibliotek/Handel/Rapporter+mv./wwf_report___indian_compan ies_in_the_21st_century.pdf TCS. Mobile Agro Advisory System. Retrieved August, 08, 2011 from http://www.tcs.com/offerings/technology-products/mKRISHI/Pages/default.aspx and http://www.tcs.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/Brochures/Innovation_Brochure_TCS_Agro_A dvisory_System_10_2010.pdf B. Bowonder, Vinay Gupta, Amit Singh. Developing a Rural Market e-hub. The Case study of e-Choupal experience of ITC. Retrieved August, 08, 2011 from http://planningcommission.nic.in/reports/sereport/ser/stdy_ict/4_e-choupal%20.pdf Arogya Ghar. Retrieved August, 08, 2011 from http://si-usa.org/projects/kiosk-based-clinics/ Ritu Dangwal, Swati Jha, Preeti Kapur (2006). Impact of Minimally Invasive Education on children: an Indian perspective. British Journal of Educational Technology. Retrieved August, 09, 2011 from http://www.hole-in-the-wall.com/docs/Paper05.pdf Asad Pastakia & Sachin Oza. Catching the Virtual Bus: ICT for Augmenting Rural Livelihood. Livelihood Augmentation in Rainfed Areas. Retrieved August 09, 2011 from http://www.dscindia.org//Downloads/DSC-LARA-3-Livelihood_010411.pdf? RBI (2006). Cab Calling, ICR For Rural Financial Services. Retrieved August 09, 2011 from http://www.ekgaon.com/files/RBI.pdf Ministry of Development. Biometrics Enabled for Peoples Empowerment under the NREGA. Retrieved August 10, 2011 from http://nrega.nic.in/circular/National_framwork_for_theuse_of_ICT&Biometrics_english.pdf