The Intel & DST – Innovate for Digital India Challenge, anchored by IIM Ahmedabad’s Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), in partnership with MyGov and the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), has successfully completed the selection phase for its accelerator program along with an intensive pitch and jury session in Ahmedabad over the July 20, 21 and 22. Of the 1913 completed applications that were considered for the challenge, a total of 50 teams were longlisted through jury deliberations that took place at CIIE, IIM Ahmedabad.
The first day of the event got the participants familiarized with the upcoming pitch sessions, with an overview of the challenge and a session on how to fine-tune their presentations from successful sales trainer and mentor, Balaji Chakravarthy, of FirstFewCustomers.com and Scovelo consulting. This was followed by 1-1 pitch sessions with CIIE team members who provided insight and guidance on the participant’s products and ideas in order to prepare them for the jury sessions. The day was bookended by an engaging session with Sunil Handa, Visiting Professor at IIMA and Founder of Eklavya Foundation, which left the audience as inspired as it had them entertained.
Over the next two days, the teams pitched their ideas and products in two concurrent jury panels. The panels consisted of leaders and domain experts from across multiple fields relevant to the program; viz. H. K. Mittal of the National Science & Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), Venguswamy Ramaswamy (TCS), Ashish Deshpande (Elephant Design), Rema Subramanian (Ankur Capital), Vishwas Mahajan (TiE), Kishore Ramisetty and Sachin Kelkar from Intel, Shankar Maruwada (EkStep), R. P. Gupta (Independent Consultant, Public Policy Expert), Naganand Doraswamy (TiE, SPAN InfoTech), Srikrishna Ramamoorthy (Unitus Seed Fund), Ajay Bhagwat (Renu Electronics) and Prof. Amit Karna and Priyanka Chopra from CIIE. The jury evaluated the top 50 teams on their execution capability, domain expertise, market attractiveness, sustainable competitive advantage(s), product development and probability of success.
Based on this evaluation, the results for the Top 20 teams who advanced in the challenge were announced on the IFDIC homepage. Working in the fields of education, healthcare, e-governance, agriculture, financial technology and other related fields, the teams will be part of a fully residential accelerator program in Pune beginning on the 5th of August. During this stage, the teams will work with the guidance of CIIE, Intel, UC Berkeley and relevant domain experts to develop their “minimum viable products” (MVP) and apps. From this group, 10 of the teams will advance to the next phase of funding after 8 weeks. Given below is a summary of these 20 ideas that may become be the next big elements of change for #DigitalIndia.
Mr. Buddha Dev Burman and Team:
4S Learning has developed a Digital Education in a Box (DEIAB) solution to factor for, and improve upon, the connectivity and quality of education available in remote and rural areas. The box is solar powered and enables long range WiFi connectivity, and contains a server, tablet, projector and educational content, with intermittent connections to the cloud to track progress and effectiveness.
Mr. Ashish Rana and Team:
This idea serves as a platform for government announcements, helping in consolidation of state-level and nationwide laws being enforced by the government. The solution aims at achieving an efficient reach of governance through geolocation-based public information systems, opening up information and communication from the government to people based on their location.
Mr. Aniket Doegar and Team:
Haqdarshak is an efficient scheme rollout and implementation system for governmental services. It works on a partnership-implementation model with other agencies, and pivots around the eponymous “haqdarshak” as the main agent. The “haqdarshak” uses a mobile/tablet app to collect information from underserved citizens to determine the relevant eligibility criteria for relevant schemes, and also helps them with a filled application form, supporting documents, and information on where and how to apply for a particular scheme.
Mr. Anand Babu and Team:
Jayalakshmi Agrotech is an ICT solution bringing “Mobility, Analytics and Cloud” to farmers. The have a package of mobile applications that are completely crop-specific and enable farmers to have all the up-to-date information about their crops. Though not information on a sensor/IoT level, the app is focused more on farmer education, giving simple-to-use tools in regional languages in the form of an intuitive dashboard, regarding fertilizer information, manure, crop-cycle, and animal husbandry. They also have a WiFi-enabled van whose purpose is to evangelize this information on the field.
Miss Aditi Sarkar and Team:
HITE, a Holographic Interactive Tool for Education, displays interactive 3D floating content which can be utilized for teaching complex topics (like explaining DNA structure or advertising a product feature) in an engaging way without the need of any 3D glasses or head mounted device. The SDK for the same gives educators the freedom to create their own content in an easy way without any coding. HITE will also include a web-store as a platform for developers all over the world to create content for the device and sell it to the users.
Mr. Vikas Srivastava and Team:
Digital Body Guard is a public safety network-based emergency communication system in the form of a wearable. Targeted at the safety of women, children and the elderly, the device is voice activated and communicates with emergency service providers like police, fire and medical services. It uses a proprietary low-power hardware with 5-7 days battery life, and low-cost IOT Hardware that can be used with various inputs and integrated with a cloud backend.
Mr. Nishanth Kumar and Team:
Embryyo is a mobile-based cervical cancer screening tool that also enables remote diagnostics. It is intended to enhance the user experience by delivering higher specificity and sensitivity.
Mr. Sachin Anchan and Team:
Airpaper is a project aimed at using the existing radio frequency bandwidth, which covers 92% of India’s surface area and reaches 99% of the population, to deliver details of government schemes, policies, informational content and news in the form of a digital news programme to citizens around the country. It has an accompanying app-based solution for receiving information as text and images; through smart phones with built-in radio receivers in urban areas, and low-cost handheld device powered by solar energy in rural areas.
Mr. Bholanath Pal and Team:
Aapna Seva is a three track e-governance idea. The first track is an anytime, anywhere digital identity solution for businesses, which serves as a backbone for commercial applications to an assortment of different industry verticals. The second track is an employment generation scheme which has loans and revenue models similar to the STD/ISD booths concept of yore. The third track is a micro-ATM for financial inclusion and other government subsidies and welfare schemes. All three tracks are rooted in AADHAR identities of citizens.
Mr. Mausamkumar Patel and Team:
Indian TTS is a Text-to-Speech engine for Indian languages with a strong significance on rhythm and prosody of speech that is closer to the natural enunciation. The service is offered through a low-cost device based on Raspberry Pi that can be used for voice services across use cases, the primary targets so far being local guides, alert systems in manufacturing, and IVR software.
Mr. Pratwiraj Palekar and Team:
DigiKYC is an automatic KYC processing and validation application that automates the KYC processing for financial institutions by reducing manual data entry and providing instant document validation. DigiKYC uses image recognition technology to identify details in KYC documents and to store them in editable formats for text based searching, validation and analytics. It also provides instant validation of documents to reduce the turnaround time of KYC validation from 8-10 days to just a few seconds.
Mr. Sajid Shariff and Team:
Doing Good Fellows (DGF) addresses the gap between demand and supply of professional services for social/grassroots organisations through an online impact-creation marketplace model. Through the digital platform, professionals and students with wide spectrum of skills like finance, marketing, sales, operations etc. can bid for live projects of social organisations and donate their skills and networks.
Mr. Gunjan Gupta and Team:
Tellmate is a text-to-speech, facial recognition and image-to-sound converter device for aiding the visually impaired. The “third eye” device is braille-independent and converts raw map data to electronic neural signal which aids in the perception of visual data for the visually impaired, apart from various use-case specific purposes tailored for solving various problems faced by the visually impaired.
Mrs. Rajlakshmi Borthakur and Team:
TJay is an IoT-based wearable platform that enables sensing, remote monitoring, diagnosis, treatment and support for people with epilepsy and other chronic disorders. It also enables real-time vital signs monitoring for hospital and home use, enabling doctors to provide data-driven analysis and faster care to patients.
Mr. Sairam Mannar and Team:
ASHA+ is solution that aims to create an effective preventive healthcare model by unifying health diagnostics, monitoring and tracking in a uniquely designed, handheld device that can capture various vitals of the patient automatically through appropriate pre-incorporated interfaces. Existing features include stethoscope, blood pressure measurement, pulse oximetry, temperature measurement, 3 lead ECG and blood glucose measurement. The accompanying smartphone app provides seamless and easy-to-use remote monitoring platform that ensures quality healthcare to people in remote areas.
Mr. Mayuresh Hooli and Team:
Sense It Out’s Green House Management as a Service (GHMS) is a single greenhouse controller device to be used in farming localities with single/multiple green houses. As an aggregating controller for various actuators, all the greenhouse parameters (soil moisture, temperature and lighting) will be controlled automatically with the help of Wireless Sensor Networks. This data will be synced to an additional cloud service that serves as a backend, along with data from agriculture researchers and weather forecasting systems. These databases will eventually be used to create an analytics dashboard that will be provided to individual greenhouse owners as a service based on their crops and soil requirements.
Mr. Gaurav Mittal and Team:
EYE-D is an electronic solution that aims to improve the quality-of-life of the blind by assisting them in navigation. The design of EYE-D comprises of a hand-held device that serves as the wireless control, ultrasonic sensors and a Bluetooth module to give vibrational and audio feedback which helps a blind person to navigate. The software application that accompanies the device also helps in identifying location and places of interest.
Mr. Ravi Sethia and Team:
Udhaar is an Aadhaar based solution which allows easy access to credit for shopping at retail outlets and for online transactions. Udhaar’s goal is to provide easy access to credit for people who lack credit cards, thereby facilitating cashless transactions. Udhaar uses data points from various sources (CIBIL score, social media, transaction history, demographics etc.) to do real-time risk modelling for a person’s profile and allows retailers to collect payments using biometric identification and phone numbers. Retailers also get access to point of sale analytics and machine-learning based recommendations engine allowing them to float loyalty programs, targeted campaigns and other engagement modes for their user base.
Mr. Sharad Bansal and Team:
SRJNA is an education model centred on a 5D model i.e., learning through sight, feeling, performance, touch and understanding. It includes a lab setup, customized teacher training, and software based student assessment.
Mr. Amiya Kumar Samantaray and Team:
Phoenix Robotix has developed a product called AURASSURE, which measures the environmental pollutants and particulate matters and feeds the real time data either in a central server through GPRS or on a LED Display board through RF technology. The product has optimized features with easy installation and interaction, reduced working time delay, and a weather-proof packaging, along with online pollution data statistics and analytics for pollution control and mitigation. Servicing and maintenance is very comfortable and fast.
Stay tuned for more updates! Meanwhile follow the action using our hashtag #innovate4digitalindia on Twitter.
– Written by Narendiran Sundararajan
CIIE @ IIM Ahmedabad 