Panelists:

• Archana Sahay, Corporate  Responsibility – APJC, Cisco Systems
• Soumya Sarkar, National Editor, Mint
• Dr. Ranganayakulu Bodvala, Founder & Director, Thrive Solar Energy Pvt. Ltd.

Moderator

• Mahesh Venkateswaran, Principal, Innovation & Engagement, NSDC

Focus:

• Share and discuss the best practices implied for Business growth and more number of Science and Technology innovations
• Discuss how digitization has helped remove physical barriers in the Business processes`
• How digital financial transaction has become faster and safer in the today`s world
• How science and technology has leveraged from the digital inclusion and led to more technological innovations
• Future outlook of Business & financial Inclusion & Science & Technology because of Digitization.

Presentations -Business & Financial Inclusion:

• Using Psychometric Credit Scoring to Expand Financial Inclusion, The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL)
• ASAR Cleantech Pvt ltd. (TheKabadiwala.com), Anurag Asati, Co-founder, CEO, TheKabadiwala.com
• bKash Limited, Syed Ghulam Dastagir
• India’s FIRST Microfinance Credit Bureau, CRIF High Mark Credit Information Services Pvt Ltd, Subhrangshu Chattopadhyay, Vice President- Business Development
• BOI NSDC Star Visa Card program, Aditya Gupta, Co-founder & Chief Operating Officer, TranServ Pvt. Ltd

Presentations -Science & Technology:

• TECHLABIKE, Agastya International Foundation
• eToilet, Eram Scientific Solutions Pvt. Ltd, Jassim Khan
• Climate Credit Pilot Project (C2P2), The Energy and Resources Institute, Omkar S Patange, Associate Fellow, Social Transformation Division
• iHelmet, Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology, Ganindu Nanayakkara, Software Engineer
• SIYARA Harbour, University of Colombo School of Computing, K D Sandaruwan, Co- Investigator /Modeling and Simulation research Group

Session Bytes

Ms. Deepshikha Sharma opened the session with a welcome note and introduced panelists to the audience. Mr. Venkateswaran invited presenters and asked them to present a brief overview of the assistive solutions developed by them for Persons with Disabilities. A total of 7 presentations were made.

Anurag Asati from ASAR Cleantech Pvt Ltd. showed the first presentation. He explained that thekabadiwala.com does its mission to Organize the Unorganized sector of the country i.e. scrap material, sell the household junk like newspapers, iron, plastic, books, copies etc. and get paid of it.
It provides a platform which is an environmentally friendly service.

Its main function is to track waste via an application and web portal to locate the nearest kabadiwala. Its business proposition is to buy second hand items and sell them, resell the useful materials, and recycle the waste to make the resource available again.

The second presentation was made by Mr. Subhrangshu Chattopadhyay from India’s FIRST Microfinance Credit Bureau, a Conceptualized Microfinance Bureau. He explained that they had developed a standard data contribution format and developed “HM MFI CONNECT” tool for automated & easy data extraction. They worked with individual MFIs to map their data to a standard format and also implemented data profiling & quality reporting.

Aditya Gupta from BOI NSDC Star Visa Card Programme was the third presenter of the day. He explained that the basic idea of the “Star” scheme was to help & train the youth for the purpose of employability and productivity. A budget of Rs.1000 Crores was set aside by the Government of India. The National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) thus tied up with Skill Development Centres (SDC). Upon successful completion of the evaluation, each individual was to be given a monetary reward of an average of Rs. 10,000. In most cases this resulted in the Training Partners not receiving timely remuneration or not receiving it altogether.
The main impacts were the creation of more than 5 lakh beneficiary accounts in 6 months and that the centrally managed platform scaled to more than 6500 SDCs and spread across 26 states and 500+ districts within 6 months. More than 2 billion rupees were processed with zero errors and with complete transparency andthere was timely, accurate and secure disbursal of reward money and support to plug possible leakages.

In the session on E-science & Technology, the first presentation was made by TechlaBike. According to them TLB is an innovative program which brings science, education and digital literacy to the door steps of the village schools.
TechLaBike program mainly focuses on the following:

• Hands-on science for children
• Multimedia exposure for children
• Digital literacy for 7th std. teachers

The uniqueness of the project is its blended approach which inculcates skills such as ICT, Science & creativity. Digital literacy training for the teachers provides a force multiplier effect. The TechLaBike Online Teacher Community Portal effectively integrates technology to promote professional development of teachers. Availability of content in local/regional languages makes the process of teaching/learning easier. It is cost-effective, scalable and sustainable.

The second presentation was made by Mr. Omkar S. Patange from Climate Credit Pilot Project (C2P2). He explained that this is an initiative under Project Surya for easy change management by incentivizing adoption and usage of cleaner stoves in rural kitchens. A cell-phone based sensor assembly, SootSwap enables easy, inexpensive and reliable verification of clean stove usage for use by carbon markets. SootSwap (Swap soot with carbon credits) is a smart mobile application that draws data from a temperature sensor assembly, connected to a clean stove in real kitchen and communicates the same to a central server.
The uniqueness of Project Surya is that it has documented the role of SLCPs in climate variability and climate change. The use of SootSwap fulfils two unique and key objectives:

• Demonstrating the ability to monitor stove usage by women in villages and send them monetary credits directly through a rural bank for mitigating emissions of global warming pollutants
• Providing the methodology to a world renowned carbon market entity.

Thus, Surya Climate Credits will be developed, not based on model studies, but from the data collected by the Surya team on air pollution levels, compliance on the use of clean stoves and fuel types and amounts.

The impact is that the field data from rural kitchens collected using SootSwap is helping in development of a Climate Credit Methodology that can calculate the reductions in short lived climate pollutants (SLCP) along with CO2 emissions resulting from the use of clean stoves. The data also gives valuable insights about stove usage patterns and factors that may affect large scale adoption of clean cooking technologies. The developed methodology shall be provided to a world renowned carbon market entity so that it can be scaled up to millions of homes.

The third presentation was made by Mr. Ganindu Nanayakkara from iHelmet, Sri Lanka. He explained that the main objective of the project is to provide situational awareness to motorcyclists.
Its features include:

• LED Flash
• Dynamic distance indicator
• Auto directions to the parking spot
• GPS based speedometer
• Remote
• Air quality sensor
• Smart backlight
• Ultrasonic distance sensor
• Speed alerts
• Smart phone flash
• Night assist
• Smart notifications
• Power-port
• SOS
• Auto location updates

There is no voice based signal in it and so it does not distract others.

The fourth presentation was made by Mr. K D Sandaruwan from SIYARA Harbour VTMS. The concept of the project is managing ship movement via a shore-based station. According to the developers, SIYARA is designed to ensure greater situational awareness, maritime safety and navigational efficiency, to protect the harbor and adjacent shore areas from the possible adverse effects of marine traffic and to provide required information to top management.
The advantages of the project are improved quality of port services and resource utilization, reduced risk associated with marine operations, primary support for collision avoidance, data storage for administrative purposes and incident analysis and reduction in the difference between day/night operations and bad weather operations.