India West, by Lisa Tsering - September 29, 2011

Six projects with implications in India are among 15 honored this year by The Tech Museum of San Jose and its prestigious Tech Awards. Each year, the Tech Awards announce 15 laureates in five categories: Environment, Economic Development, Education, Equality, and Health. On Oct. 20, representatives from the 15 laureate projects will gather at a gala event in San Jose, where the final five Tech Awards will be announced.

Three laureates from India are competing for the Flextronics Economic Development Award:

• Nano Ganesh, based in Pune, offers a simple, low-cost, mobile phone-based device that allows remote monitoring and operation of irrigation pumps. More than 10,000 devices have already been installed in farms around Maharashtra.

Since remote irrigation pumps are difficult to monitor and control, their malfunction can compromise crop yields, waste water and energy, add to costs, and increase stress for farmers. 

Santosh Ostwal, an engineer living in Pune, would often visit his home village and saw how much work it was. His own 82-year-old grandfather, who had lost a leg to gangrene and walked with a stick, would walk a mile to switch on the water-pump to ensure that his oranges were ready to ship the next morning — and sometimes made 10 trips per night. In 1991, Ostwal decided to solve the problem, and spent the next 20 years working on his solution.

“There are 3.1 million official connections of water pump sets in Maharashtra alone,” he said in an interview with The Economist magazine. “A 5hp motor which wastes 4 to 5 hours of water daily not only consumes up to 1,000 liters per day, but also results in soil erosion which decreases the yield.”

After one two-week visit to his village, he says, “I decided, ‘Yes. This is my career and I am going to make my career in irrigation automation. That’s all.’”

According to the company’s Web site, a Nano Ganesh instrument is connected to the existing starter on the pump. A farmer has to simply dial a number dedicated for a Nano Ganesh set and then punch in an on or off code for the control of the pump set. It can be connected to any existing electrical starter and motor pumps and activated from any distance.

• Eko India Financial Services of New Delhi enables 800,000 clients, many of them migrant laborers in Delhi, Bihar and Jharkhand, to carry out millions of transactions daily. Since financial services are inaccessible to a majority of India’s population, Eko makes banking possible with its simple, instant, and safe banking and money-transfer services known as mini-savings accounts — with transactions handled via mobile phone.

Clients highlighted on Eko’s Web site include individuals such as Salim, a fruit seller with three children who is now saving Rs. 20-30 a day in his first-ever bank account. The organization works with the State Bank of India along with small-business partners in India, and is funded in part by investments from the Chicago-based Creation Investments Social Ventures Fund.

Eko was founded by Abhishek Sinha and Abhinav Sinha, both graduates of the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi.

• The Rickshaw Bank Project allows rickshaw-wallahs, some of the poorest of India’s millions of urban workers, to “rent to own” newly designed rickshaws that are safer, lighter, and more efficient. Five thousand new rickshaws are currently in use and 1,700 are now already paid for in full.

Created in 2004 by Dr. Pradip Kumar Sarmah, executive director of the Centre for Rural Development and a veterinarian by profession, the project empowers rickshaw pullers — many of whom are migrants from outside the big cities and find themselves obligated to rent rickshaws from local mafias at inflated prices. Out of the average daily income of Rs. 75 rupees, pullers are obliged to pay the owner Rs. 25 rupees. 

With the Rickshaw Bank Project, pullers are able to fully repay their loans in 12-24 months with the same Rs. 25 a day that they used to pay local mafias. In addition, the loan of approximately Rs. 13,000 for the rickshaw also covers money for a uniform, an identity card, a license and two-year insurance. 

Coincidentally, the Rickshaw Bank Project is one of the initiatives supported by the American India Foundation. It is located in Guwahati, Assam.

One project from India is among the three nominated for the Katherine M. Swanson Equality Award.

• Awaaz.De, Hindi for “give your voice,” addresses a problem of rural Indian society in which people in developing regions lack access to on-demand localized information sources and a platform to “give their voice,” or share what they know. It was founded by a pair of Indian Americans from the San Francisco Bay Area,

According to its site, Awaaz.De’s core functionality is a voice message board: people dial a local or toll-free number to post, browse, and reply to others’ voice messages. It offers high-quality, relevant information in any language, and is used throughout India by social development organizations in agriculture, labor rights, education, and women’s empowerment.

“The previous laureates are literally a who’s who of successful and innovative social enterprises, and it is an honor to even be mentioned on the same list,” cofounder Tapan Parikh told India-West in an e-mail. He started Awaaz.De with Neil Patel.

The company was founded just one year ago — Patel just finished his Ph.D. in computer science this summer at Stanford, while Parikh is an assistant professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information.

Two Indian projects are up for the Nokia Health Award.

• E Healthpoint has developed high-tech clinics delivering reliable, affordable, high-quality care, medicines, and diagnostics through community health workers — along with offering safe drinking water.

Based in Punjab, E HealthPoint administers eight clinics and 75 associated WaterPoints serving 250,000 people.

The initiative has also won this year’s USAID Grand Challenge Award and the Sankalp Award for its unique and far-reaching program. Its genius lies in combining safe drinking water with medical facilities. Families pay just Rs. 75 per month for 20 liters per day of reverse osmosis-purified water; and gain access to tele-medical consultations in regional languages and reduced-price medicines.

“The Tech Awards is an incredible honor, recognizing individuals and organizations whose ideas and execution of those ideas are changing the world, hence this award for E HealthPoint’s pioneering and futuristic social business model catering to the low-income communities is very gratifying for the community of social entrepreneurs like us,” said Amit Jain, cofounder and president of E HealthPoint, in a statement.

• Sarvajal, a for-profit which works mainly in Gujarat and Rajasthan, has developed franchised water treatment facilities that provide real-time information over the cellular network to manage quality and quantity remotely. Among the distribution methods are solar-powered “water ATMs.” Currently, Sarvajal serves 120 facilities in India and 60,000 people for less than $3 per month per family.

“Like many water service providers, we believe that local communities are best positioned to meet their own water needs. Our model puts this belief directly into practice using rural franchising,” said a company spokesperson. 

Sarvajal recruits local entrepreneurs to sell water to their communities from Piramal Water-owned filtration equipment, and water revenues are shared 60:40 between the franchisee and Sarvajal. The company took the 2010 Sankalp award.

Sarvajal utilizes new technologies on three fronts — it can track water production and quality at all Sarvajal locations in real-time; control filtration operations remotely; and identify and diagnose potential maintenance issues before they occur.

The Tech Awards, presented by Applied Materials in association with the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University, is a signature program of The Tech Museum. Since the inception of The Tech Awards program in 2000, 245 laureates around the world have been recognized for their work to change lives for the better. This year, more than 600 projects from around the world vied for the honor.

“Thanks to the empowering, far-reaching work of The Tech Awards laureates, our world is more humane, just and sustainable,” said Ann Bowers, chairwoman of The Tech Museum Board of Directors, in a statement.

During their weeklong stay in Silicon Valley, the laureates will be engaged in specialized business and media training and networking with leading tech companies, venture capitalists, and academics, among others. Their achievements will also be put on display for the public.

For more information, visit http://thetechawards.thetech.org.

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