NASSCOM Foundation and Mphasis Look towards  Pune to Become a Social Innovation Hub

Pune, September 21 , 2017: Pune is making its presence felt in the start-up space and stands out as a city with exceptional innovation quotient. The city has not only produced some of the best start-ups but is also making its mark in the Social Innovation space.

As NASSCOM Social Innovation Forum – India’s Largest Social Innovation Platform, steps into its 10th edition, NASSCOM Foundation, along with its partnerMphasis, is banking on Pune to come up with some strong social innovations across the categories of Financial Inclusion, Healthcare, Environment, Education, accessibility and other social issues.

In the past, Pune has given India some really amazing social innovations that the whole country could be proud of.

One such innovation by a local Pune based company – Bleetech (NASSCOM Social Innovation Winner 2017),has broken new grounds in the area of wearable technology by using it to help the hearing impaired.

India is home to over 60 million people with hearing impairment, many of whom belong to lower income groups. For the hearing impaired, maintaining a normal life is difficult as daily occurrences go unnoticed. Such as sounds of doorbells, babies crying, fire alarms and so on. Missing moments such as these could be critical. Existing assistive devices or aids however, still remain very expensive and are therefore unaffordable to the masses.

The Blee Wearable for the hearing impaired tries to address this critical gap in the market by creating a wearable easy to use affordable device that notifies hearing impaired individuals of certain activities and sounds of which they need to be vigilant. The wearable notifies the user of pre-recorded sound alerts using lights and vibrations. There is a unique set of vibrations for each sound alert. The device is connected to the user’s phone via Bluetooth where all the sounds are pre -recorded and stored. The capability of the device increases as the repository of pre-recorded sounds grow. The device can also be used independently as a smart phone application.

Another Pune based NASSCOM Social Innovation Winner from the 2016 edition, Rankskills, has been bridging the gap between graduates from tier 2 and tier 3 and the SMEs and startups.

On the employment front Start-Up’s and SME’s both struggle with man power supply due to their ad-hoc requirements as well as longer hiring cycles. They also lack visibility or the HR resources to identify fresh talent in Universities and hence find it difficult to recruit correctly as per their needs. On the job seekers side, many students graduating from Universities in Tier 2- Tier 3 cities are left out of the employment race as bigger corporates tend to overlook them only hiring from more established institutes.

Rankskills is the first online platform that connects youth from Tier 2- Tier 3 educational institutes to Start-Ups /SME’s. The portal not only provides visibility of jobs to candidates and profiles of students to SME’s but has also built in features to connect job seekers to mentors and skilling providers to help them improve other necessary professional skills. The organization is also in the process of building a telephony service aimed at helping students and youth to improve their communication skills thereby enhancing their employability.

NASSCOM Foundation is confident that Pune can produce many more technology based innovative solutions that can bring about a positive change across the country and urges all social enterprises and NGOs with similar solutions to apply for NSIF at www.nsif.in.

This year with support from Mphasis, NSIF will award catalytic grants of INR 10 Lakhseach to the strongest tech innovations that are creating radical social impact in areas ofFinancial Inclusion, Healthcare, Environment, Education and Accessibility.

The projects will also be provided with a 12-monthSupport to Scale Mentoring by experts in the industry as well as access to NASSCOM Foundation’s network of tech for good leaders in the country.

For details on the NSIF application process and more, please visit – www.nsif.in or write to the team at [email protected].

Applications for NSIF are open from 21st September 2017 till 31st October, 2017.