Nasscom awards: Technology for social good

“I would be travelling for work in the evening hours and my mother would constantly call me, asking where have I reached, and if I was doing fine,” says Richa Yadav, 25, who works with Microsoft in Hyderabad. What she points out is the predicament of millions of young working women across India. But none would have thought the way she did. “It set me thinking that there should be some mechanism wherein my parents are automatically informed of my location, and in case of an emergency, they should get an alarm too,” Yadav says. This thought became the basis for Stipator, a smartphone app that she, along with three of her colleagues, have come up with.

“The free-to-download smartphone app posts the user’s location details regularly on social networks, visible to only those whom she wants. The app also has an SOS feature, allowing a call, an SMS and an email with a single click, to a preconfigured phone number and email address,” adds Ratnesh Desai, her partner in the project. Aptly so, “stipator” means “bodyguard” in Latin.

In an announcement made on Tuesday, Nasscom Foundation has declared Stipator as the winner for Nasscom Social Innovation Honours (NSIH) 2013, in the “Social Innovation by Individual/ Group” category.

Across the board, the list of winners illustrates that not

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