The Nasscom Foundation recently announced the winners of its second annual Nasscom Social Innovation Honors 2010 at its India Leadership Summit 2010. The Honors were given to deserving projects that strive to bring about social change and development through technology.

The Honors were judged by an eminent jury of Narayana Murthy (Founder-Chairman, Infosys Technologies Limited), T. N. Ninan (Chairman and Editorial Director, Business Standard), Rama Bijapurkar (Independent Market Strategy Consultant), Jaithirth (Jerry) Rao (Chairman, Nasscom Foundation) and Saurabh Srivastava (Trustee, Nasscom Foundation).
 
The criteria for participation was that the organizations should be registered in India or a foreign entity with a registered presence in India, the innovation must benefit India, or a community in India and the organization should be in existence in India for a minimum of one year.
 
The Honors were given in the following categories:
 
1.    ICT LED INNOVATION BY NON-PROFITS

The Health Management and Research Institute (HMRI) won the Honors for its unique means of reaching at-risk rural populations with its 24x7 health helpline - 104 Advice. This health contact centre offers non-emergency medical advice, information and counseling services on the toll free '104' number. Assisted by pre-formatted algorithms and disease summaries, callers are matched with appropriately qualified health workers (including medical specialty experts) who provide advice/counseling or make preliminary diagnoses and referrals for further treatment.
 
2.    ICT LED INNOVATION THROUGH CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

Iris Business Services won an Honor for creating an internet based voting mechanism through which children in the schools of Navi Mumbai could vote for the candidate of their choice from amongst those standing for elections, IRIS succeeded in generating interest and debate amongst the students. The process mimicked real life: each class had a class Electoral officer appointed by the Class teacher or the civics teacher who was given the responsibility of getting students enrolled as voters.

This election was given media coverage and to spread the word, voting happened through a link on the NMTV website.  The interschool voting competition with prizes for highest voter turnout and certificates for all 'responsible voting citizens' generated further enthusiasm and response among the students. The solution was available in both English and Marathi.
 
Multi Commodity Exchange of India won an Honor for it's Public Private Partnership (PPP) with India Post. MCX's Gramin Suvidha Kendra (GSK) entered into partnerships with various organizations to bring a gamut of services under a single window ranging from - price/market information, addressing technical queries regarding farming, providing scientific warehousing facilities, issuing warehouse receipts and credit lending to supplying quality agricultural and non-agricultural inputs, providing a platform for spot trading, and weather insurance services.
 
Steria (India) won an Honor for its 'community model' which engages a child right from his early school days in primary school, through middle school on to senior school and beyond. With facilities such as computer centers, libraries, morning milk and play areas, self learning English language software, theatre clubs, vocational skills and mentorship and so on an effort to provide a "Superior School Experience" for all round development of the child is put in place.

Children also had the opportunity to benefit from the Steria India Foundation Graduate Scholarship Scheme (SIFGSS) that provides financial assistance for pursuing a university degree.
 
ITC won an Honor for coming up with viable options in the area of social and farm forestry. After investing in R&D, they came up with BCM clones that not only grow faster, are disease resistant, require less water but also has 3-4 times more productivity under rain fed condition and 6-7 times under irrigated conditions. This made ITC forestry program a commercially viable option for farmers and communities.

In the area of watershed development, a unique model was used wherein the scale and resources of the government, community mobilization skills of NGOs and the management skills of ITC together provided higher wealth generation capability to the beneficiaries and achieved a larger scale operation. In the area of waste recycling, ITC provides special bags to accumulate dry waste like paper, plastic and metals and arranges periodic collection through outsourced agencies. Waste paper is used by ITC to manufacture paperboards and other materials are sold to recycling industries.
 
 
3.    ICT LED BUSINESS INNOVATION FOR DEVELOPMENT

Educomp Solutions won an Honor for its teaching-learning paradigm in schools across India. The company offered interventions, products and services to teach children in the language they understand and with multimedia that bring to life abstract curricular concepts. With the introduction of MagiKeys Software, the company has enabled 'Online' / 'Offline' ICT usage in different languages like English, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Urdu, Konkani, Punjabi and Sanskrit.

With its training modules to help understand technology as a tool for imparting knowledge, the company looked at providing teachers support and quality training to use it effectively in the classroom. Its Build-Own-Operate-Transfer (BOOT) Model is designed to help State Governments increase their achievement of targets by investing initially minimal resources.
 
Geodesic won an Honor for GeoAmida, which enables service providers to biometrically identify customers, deliver multiple services remotely and securely, and functions reliably in the remotest parts of the world. Its multilingual, graphical interface (display, print and speech) is designed to address low IT literacy of the users & fundamentally improve ease of use.
 
TATA Consultancy Services won an Honor for mKRISHI, its innovative end-to-end platform involving mobile phones with camera, automatic weather station, sensors, mobile user interface software, server software and connectivity to information sources such as weather prediction applications, current commodity price feeds etc. The solution is designed to give personalized services to farmers by collating the soil, crop and micro climatic data of any land, allowing experts to provide advice on any aspect of farming (such as soil conservation, fertilizer input, pesticide and crop health) on their mobile phone. It allows farmers throughout India to make a query in a local language from a mobile phone and receive personalized advice from experts in the local language.