Winners of the NASSCOM Foundation’s First Social Innovation Honours announced

CELEBRATING THE CAUSE OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT THROUGH INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY (ICT)

NASSCOM Foundation (NF) announced the winners of the Social Innovation Honours at the annual NASSCOM Leadership Forum last week. The Honours, pioneered by NF, aims to showcase projects that demonstrate best practices through exemplary use of ICT in areas of social transformation. Mr. Kamal Nath, Honourable Minister for Commerce and Industry, the Chief Guest for the event gave away the awards to the winners of the Social Innovation Honours.

Elaborating about the awards Ms. Rufina Fernandes, CEO, NASSCOM Foundation, said, “For NF, a social innovation can be a product, a process, or a technology, as well as a principle, an idea, a piece of legislation, a social movement, an intervention, or some combination of them. This award is both an honour as well as a source of encouragement to organizations to continue to make a difference in the area of social development using ICT.  The parameters on which the nominees were judged were the ICT Innovativeness, Social Development, cost/timelines and the sustainability.”

The name of the winners and a small synopsis of their activities are given below:

1. Non-profit organization: ICT innovation for the community (non-profit)

• Kolkata Swasthya Sankalp, Kolkata – A automated and identity secured AMS based solution for voluntary blood donation.
  
• Spastics Society of Karnataka, Bangalore – Introduced an initiative for people with disability called Centre for Assistive Technology for Education and Life Skills Training. The Assistive Technology devices and software, enables people with special needs to carry out more activities and to make teaching more effective for all groups of children with disabilities.

2 a. Profit organization: ICT led business model innovation (for profit)

• SMSONE Media Services, Pune – A very innovative method of starting a Local SMS Community Newsletter to promote self employment in school and college dropouts. An unemployed youth collects 1000 mobile numbers of local residence and starts a SMS based newsletter to alert, update and inform them about local social happenings. It’s a free service to citizens and yet the unemployed youth earns about 6-10,000/month through promotional messages.
  

2 b. Profit organization: ICT innovation for the community (non-profit)

T-Edge Solutions, Pune – aarogya.com aims to be India’s leading comprehensive health information portal. The site has sections, which cover almost all the medical specialties and give useful information on various diseases. To enhance its reach, the content is available in Indian languages too. They are the first health website to introduce online support groups. Addiction support and Epilepsy support are examples of some very active and vibrant communities.

The winners were adjudged, on the basis of multitude parameters set by Ernst & Young, by a grand jury comprising of Mr. Narayana Murthy, Ms. Rama Bijapurkar, Mr. Jaithirth Rao, Mr. Saurabh Srivasatava and Mr. Harish Mehta.

For further information visit :
http://www.nasscomfoundation.org