India Excels with software for handicapped

Product launchers are par for the course at information technology fairs but you don't expect anything spectacular at a sarkari show where ministers gather to talk what ministers talks about IT. But the Asia IT ministers' second summit here produced a few surprise: At the inaugural session, Union IT Minister Arun Shourie presented to the delegates some stunning software tools developed in some state owned R&B labs in India: a translation and search combination that can deliver an answer to an SMS query in Hindi, software for the visually handicapped.

Mr. Shourie introduced delegates - both ministerial and industrial to a bunch of software tools developed for the handicapped available at a reasonable price for deployment across the region. And helping him out in his mission to drag exhibits out of show-piece stalls to the main-area were four blind children who demonstrated C-DAC's Mantra, a machine assisted translation tool, Vachantar, which helps Internet browsing through listening , Anveshak an extraction and search software and Webel Mediatronics Ltd's computerized Braille Transcription system and Brailler, a Rs 50,000 braille printer that has already been distributed across 70 schools and NGOs in the country. Webel is a subsidiary of the West Bengal Industry Development Corporation Ltd.

"This is what we have worked on and have to offer, let us share our strengths and develop a range of products that can address specific needs in countries in this region," he reiterated to ministers form 32 countries including China, Singapore, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Kuwait, Mauritius and Hong Kong. He had made the same appeal earlier in the day at his inaugural speech when he expressed distress over to protectionist practices adopted by countries like Europe, Australia and the U.S.

Referring to the endless efforts at legislating against outsourcing of work to India, he said that it was a matter of concern that whenever India developed a skill, the West responded with barries.

"They pressurise us at the WTO to open our markets for goods, but close their doors on both our goods and services. We must develop a range of products and multilingual software to satisfy our needs."

The minister who shared the pains of rearing a spastic child with the audience, pointed out that help was available through technology even as the demo earned repeat applauses.

While there are imported software packages for the challenged, Dr. Hemant Darbari, program coordinator, Applied Artificial Intelliegence Group, C-DAC, Pune told ET that they were not only exorbitantly priced but were of no use due to the US and UK accents. Coming close on heels of complaints of dissatisfaction against "India accents" in the BPO Sector, this researcher's 15 years efforts seems to have paid off with Mantra, the text to speech and text to Braille software beta carrying the Indian accent and Indian English. The same has been used to translate Hindi speeches in the Rajya Sabha for the previous to sessions to print bulletin part I and II.

Telecom companies like Tata and Relience are now in talks with C-DAC to acquire the extraction software. Anveshak helps to search the answer of a query sent on SMS; a great value add for mobile users.

Meanwhile Webel has developed an icon-based alternative and augmentative communication software which is being used at the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy in Kolkata and the SRSC, Aizawl (in the Mizo language). This software helps a spastic to communicate through icons.

As Mr. Shourie told the summit, "the read divide is between those with faculties and those without."

[Economic Times dated 13/01/2004]

India Inc needs 'next practices': CK Prahlad

Indian Corporate sector needs to adopt strategies in corporating 'Next practices' to enhance competitiveness, as implementation of best practices by all companies would only result in the formation of mediocre firms, observed Dr. C K Prahlad, Harvey C. Fruehauf Professor of business administration at the University of Michigan Business School.

Speaking on 'The future of competition' at the 10th Partnership summit 2004, Dr. Prahlad said the design of next practices would be based on closer relationships with customers and the process of value creation would be driven by five key drivers in India. He said the new process of value creation will force Indian Corporates to focus on the poor.

Among the key drivers, the single serve revolution has enabled customers to shift between  products and brands almost immediately ensuring that firms continuously monitored changes in customer experiences and tastes. 

The direct distribution system as the second driver enabled firms to have thousands of entrepreneurs marketing their products around the country. The rural connectivity is the third factor that would ensure that the asymmetry to information and choice in rural areas would diminish and force Indian companies to incorporate rural experiences while designing products and marketing strategies.

The emergence of focused chat rooms and wireless revolution as other key factors enabled firms to deliver competitive products and received real time experiences from customers. An important pre-requisite for firms to meet the challenges of the new company - customer relationship paradigm would be to build more flexible, dynamic information backbones to capture and deliver real-time insights, he added.

[Economic Times dated 13/01/2004]