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. (more…)

We have partnered with Ericsson in setting up India’s first HSPA-powered rural broadband network that will deliver 3G applications across 18 villages and 15 towns in Tamil Nadu. 

The Initiative called Gramjyoti, aims at bringing about a revolution in high-speed wireless networks in the rural sector and to demonstrate how WCDMA/HSPA technology can aid social and economic empowerment in rural areas. Farmers and villagers will now have access to e-learning, e-governance, mobile health and mobi TV .The Rural Broadband Project have chosen areas that  reflect the typical telecom profile of rural India, where many families have limited or no access to fixed telephones, but do have access to a mobile phone.

We as a partner are currently powering an application that enables farmers and villages in the area to have access to the rise and falls in various commodity prices in their mandi, be it vegetables, fruits or grains.   

 The Gramjyoti initiative has also partnered with an NGO called Hand in Hand, Erudite, Apollo Hospitals & Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation and Turner Broadcasting System.

Technology has been effectively used to increase the productivity in Agricultural sector which continues to engage over 60% of Indian population. eSagu or Web based Agricultural Expert Advise Dissemination System has been awarded the best e-governance project at the Computer Society of India Nihilent e-Governance Awards. Increasing coverage of rural areas by wireless connectivity and soon-to-be adopted 3G network is sure to make the application turn mobile. Rural India is a hot market for VAS application developers and mobile operators. We expect to see large variety of customized applications tapping into it’s desire for m-governance, m-commerce, entertainment, education related services.