Saturday night brought good news for One97 with our mobile application, Dakia being declared as one of the winners in the ‘m-Inclusion’ category at mBillionth South Asia Awards 2010. Held at Hotel Intercontinental Eros, New Delhi, mBillionth witnessed 165 mobile VAS nominations, 121 coming from India alone.

Our persisting efforts behind making Dakia possible attained recognition when it was announced as one of the winners of the big night. Dakia is a voice based multi-lingual mobile application for the aggregation and dissemination of community centric information in rural areas, irrespective of the literacy levels of the user. It is meant to empower the rural population by being informed about major issues like impending power cuts, weather reports, crop diseases and treatments, new market prices and general welfare, which in turn affect their daily lives.

As Vijay puts it in an earlier interview published on Medianama:

“We have an application called Dakiya. You can’t sell SMS in the rural market – even Hindi is non-native. You have to have a vernacular application, and vernacular in text does not exist. I don’t think Rural VAS is limited to Mandi Rates. We built up a community of villagers, where a few are authorized to pass the messages. Rural requires rural content, which we sitting here cannot generate.

A sarpanch (village head) will publish a message in their local language, and it gets broadcast to the group. This is on voice – so it breaks across the barrier of SMS. We’ve seen a couple of thousand messages a month from a village, like information on power cuts, crop information, local initiatives. It is democratization of content. Interestingly, a consumer doesn’t have to pay anything, because it is included in their monthly rental. These are the kind of applications that work for the masses.”

Image Source: Neelesh Misra’s blog