Three Indian origin innovators in MIT Technology Review list
28 Aug 2010
Two Microsoft Research in Bangalore employees, one of whom since left to found an NGO are among 35 people recognised as 'outstanding innovators under the age of 35 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's prestigious publication, Technology Review.
Indrani Medhi, 31, was recognised for development of text-free user interfaces that allow illiterate persons, while interacting with computers for the first time, to immediately deploy them to find jobs, get medical information and perform banking transactions with minimal or no assistance.
Rikin B Gandhi, 28, who started the NGO Digital Green, has created a solution to help farmers adopt better practices.
The solution was first piloted in Hubli and has been implemented across several locations in the country. It has been demonstrated to be 10 times more effective, for every rupee spent, in converting farmers to better farming practices than conventional approaches.
The third Indian-origin innovator in the list is 34-year-old Ranveer Chandra, who has been recognised for delivering high-speed wireless internet connections over longer distances in the US.
Rikin Gandhi was born and brought up in the US but had come over to India in 2006 at the instance of a friend, in connection with a biodiesel project in rural Maharashtra. The project failed but he stayed back to found the NGO Digital Green to help farmers produce agricultural videos on their own.
The videos, which feature locals, are then screened before the community with a $100 hand-held, battery-operated projector.
According to Gandhi Digital Green works with a non-governmental organisation that has been working in the area and initially the videos for an areas tend to be in line with new agricultural practices that the NGO has been trying to establish. With feedback Digital Green develops new topics to work with.