Aadhaar- data entry outsourced
Innovation has seen many landmarks — from running a successful business process outsourcing (BPO) in his native village Sagroli in Nanded district, to being nominated for the prestigious Microsoft’s Innovate4Good conference which is to be held in Singapore at the end of this month.
It has been Joshi’s out-of-the-box thinking and usage of Information Technology (IT) that has helped him walk the road to success.
With the help of NGOs, the MKVKC worked miracles for the villagers. “Ours’ being a village of agriculturists, information about seed patterns and other farming related issues were crucial. Since such resources were very few, we decided to use the World Wide Web for help,” he said.Aqua, an agriculture website came to the rescue of Joshi, who devised a unique method to help his fellow agriculturists.“We used to take printouts of the agricultural tips given on the website and distribute it among the farmers. Besides, this being an interactive website, we used to post the farmers’ questions on the website and get their answers the next day,” he said.
This proved to be a boon for the farmers, who benefited in terms of yield and profits.
A big question before Joshi was how to generate income for IT-trained village youth. “We decided to open a BPO for our youths, who were trained in the basics of IT. From the government departments, we took upon the tasks of filling up online forms for Aadhar card and other works to generate income,” he said.
The success of the schemes could be gauged by the fact that the centre has managed to pay the salaries of the six people who work there. Joshi’s out-of-the-box thinking and successful model soon caught the eyes of the Nasscom Foundation, which nominated him to attend the Innovate4Good conference in Singapore.Visibly excited about the trip, Joshi said that it was a dream come true for him.“For me, it is the fruit of hard work and we plan to take this initiative across different talukas of the district,” he said.