Throw Trash Into This Bin & Get Free Wi-Fi!

At the NH7 Music Festival last year, the music flowed and the crowds rocked to it. When they took a break from all that grooving and went to get refreshments, little did they know, a freebie would be available to them – free Wi-Fi – and at a dustbin, at that! This was so people were encouraged to use that dustbin and not litter the venue.

This bright spark of an idea belongs to Raj Desai and Pratik Agarwal – the Thinkscream duo. Thinkscream’s “aim is to ensure that people in India and around the world, have access to, and take advantage of all the available new age technology.” To ensure this happens, they built innovative products, like the TS Connect for Multiplexes and TS Connect for High Crowd Density events.

The NH7 Music Festival was exactly the sort of “High Crowd Density event” that both of them love, to showcase their innovative use of technology. They seem to have hit the right spot with this idea because they were sponsored by MTS. Their other satisfied clients are: Cinemax, Red Bull, and Tata Teleservices among others.

Apart from Wi-Fi, they are into radio frequency identification technology (RFID) as well, since they want to “ensure that this near frequency communication technology helps upgrade various business verticals and solves a number of pain points.”

Raj told Networked India, “We have always been intrigued by human behaviour, and how we can effectively use basic incentives, to modify it a bit. When we wanted to set up Wi-Fi at Weekender (the NH7 event) with brandmovers and MTS, we wanted to provide something more than just vanilla Wi-Fi. That’s when we thought that incentivising people to keep their areas clean would be a good idea.”

He admits that getting corporations on board is a big challenge. He says,

People in India are yet to realise how effective little modifications in process, systems, and their designs can be, to bring about large scale change.”

However, he has watched people respond positively to their ideas. He added, “Right from OrderOffWi-Fi for Cinemas to Wi-Fi at music festivals or the Wi-Fi trash bin; it feels amazing when people come and congratulate you for the idea, and more importantly use the product. In fact, we were amused when we saw people queuing up to use the Wi-Fi trash bin.”

He and Pratik are open to ideas and suggestions from others too. In fact, if people show up at their offices with beverages, food, music, and/or movies, they are more than welcome!

Written for Ericsson.

CINI’s GPower App Empowers Vulnerable Adolescent Girls

If you have often seen children being exploited and your heart goes out to them; then ever wondered if NGOs like CRY, World Vision, and Childline are enough to handle all these neglected and unwanted waifs? Both girls and boys are taken out of school and made to work and earn money. Their childhoods are snatched away prematurely and they are forced to become adults before their time.

Child In Need Institute (CINI) understood this because they have seen it happen time and again, especially with girl children, who are forced to get married and have children early, even when they are not physically, emotionally, and mentally ready to start families.

To help and monitor vulnerable children – and they mostly seem to belong to the female gender – CINI has developed an app called GPower (Girl Power). GPower was launched as a joint venture between Accenture and CINI last year, after a survey was done on the condition of educational programmes among girls in South 24 Parganas and Murshidabad districts. It has helped save over 200 girls spread across 20 villages, from either being trafficked or being a child marriage victim, reported NDTV.

CINI’s Assistant Director, Dr Indrani Bhattacharya told Networked India, “The girls in GPower are caught in the vicious cycle of vulnerabilities, like school dropout, early marriage, early pregnancy, child labour and trafficking. It starts from birth and they are trapped in a society with socio-cultural and harmful practices, gender-norms and contrasting stages of development, that leaves them powerless to make essential life-choices.”

Saving these girls’ lives through a digital innovation (like the app) with real-time alarm and alerts, and through strengthening the community-based safety net in the family and village itself, could save a society. This is what inspired CINI’s birth.”

Via GPower, community facilitators (CFs) record and monitor the vulnerability of adolescent girls. It also identifies the girls at higher risk ahead of time, to enable timely intervention and tracks the delivery of appropriate services to avoid potentially untoward incidents.

This enables errors to be minimised and streamlines the collection of valuable information, such as details about a girl’s education, protection, health and nutrition. Information from the mobile device is then uploaded to the cloud, and a server-based software uses this to compute a vulnerability index for each girl, in real-time. This, in turn, allows for real-time data analysis.

These insights create a continuous information flow that not only allows tracking of individual cases of vulnerability, but also reveals trends and allows forecast of results. The app-as-a-solution also has links across the government agencies that “provide support for adolescent girls; giving the facilitator a ready view into the services across the four pillars that should be leveraged for each individual to reduce her vulnerability index”, Bhattacharya explained.

She added. “Aggregated data delivers status reports to the facilitator on the uptake of services. These status reports can also be used to uncover issues with specific services and service providers, and support more effective service delivery.”

“At the implementation level, GPower is helping monitor the effectiveness
 of CFs by measuring their performance and setting benchmarks. Based on this evaluation, necessary training can be provided to CFs to improve their skills, and motivate them to do their jobs better.”

While CINI has had to convince (and often browbeat) parents to let their girls continue to study; most parents have given in and let it happen. They have also not married their girls off too young. And this gives them immense satisfaction, as one of their ‘vulnerable victims’ is now well on her way to becoming an empowered teacher!

This child had been rescued by CINI and re-admitted to school. Bhattacharya recalls, “The panchayat head helped her to get admission without any cost. She is studying in class VII and now she is saying that “Ami abar swapno dekha shuru korechi ar ami bhobissate ekjon teacher hote chai.” (“I have started to see my dream again and I want to be a teacher in future.”)

Written for Ericsson's blog.