Foundry Conversations Podcast Episode 6: A Social Media Platform for Voices Unheard with Vijay Sai Pratap
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EPISODE DESCRIPTION: Vijay is co-founder and CEO of GramVaani (OnionDev Technologies Pvt Ltd), a social tech enterprise that builds innovative voice-based community media technologies for the underserved, with a mission to reverse the flow of information. Working closely with communities and partners across sectors, GramVaani has touched over 3 million individuals, enabling them to not just access and share life impacting information, but also voice their opinions or ask questions. A Telecom and Technology for Development professional for over 18 years, and has also been a part of the Foundry community as an Acumen India fellow in 2020.
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What is Foundry Conversations?
Foundry Conversations is an initiative created by members of The Foundry at Acumen Academy. We chat with leaders like you who are tackling the world’s toughest challenges. Together, we explore the most critical issues in their communities, how they navigate this complex moment in time, and what moral leadership means to them. You’ll get an inspiring glimpse of their vision for a better world, and practical ideas for creating the change that matters most to you.
Full Transcript
Podcast Introduction (Neel, Daisy, Daniela)
Welcome to Foundry Conversations. This podcast is brought to you by a global community of builders and innovators committed to a meaningful, positive impact. We chat with leaders around the globe like you, who are tackling the world’s toughest challenges. In this space, you’ll hear guests share about the most critical issues in their communities, how they navigate this complex moment in time, and what moral leadership means to them.
Vijay
There is a person named Ajmal with physical disability from a place called Tumkur in the Southern part of India in the state of Karnataka. He had a petty job that he earned about Rs 500 a month from a small job that he did. He had about five children but wasn’t motivated actually to think bigger- that was until he heard the story of successful entrepreneurs with disability on Namma Vaani, which means my voice
He was motivated and dug deeper to find out how he can apply for loans for a business of his own and actually try and do something bigger than what he was already doing. After getting the answer he needed from the platform, he applied and actually got a loan to start his own petty shop. Now he actually earns about Rs 2,400 a month, which is definitely a much better amount and actually helps him take care of his family.
Let’s talk about another important story that we have seen. In one of the states of Southern India, Tamil Nadu, there are many workers working in the spinning mills or garment factories. It is a major textile belt. Many women who work in this textile belt amounting to more than 400,000 women face daily exploitation. Lot of issues pertaining to the number of hours of work they do, the benefits they get. They mostly are not aware of the rights, entitlements and job related wages, etc and most often do not get enough avenues to share their grievances for fear of losing their job.
In such a scenario, one of our platforms that operates in this particular state. Some women working in these sectors happened to get access to our platform and they recorded their grievances on their platform. Issues pertaining to exploitation, issues pertaining to access to basic facilities like toilets. And these grievances were then subsequently taken up by local trade Union partners, local human rights partners, and also lawyers who work for these women, and with these women. These grievances were then taken up with the concerned authorities, with the concerned local stakeholders, with the employers and many of these grievances that were aired, but most importantly anonymous that’s helping provide a very safe space for these women on this particular platform.
This then led to subsequent and significant change for women, not just who shared their grievances but across the system. When many of the factories, many of the places of work actually had to go through some sort of an audit process, when this came to the notice of the Human Rights Commission in the state. This is what we call impact at scale. This is what we call impact at an institutional level. The earlier example I spoke about was impact at an individual level at a family level.
And similarly, Mobile Vaani has seen many such stories of change, stories of impact that are collected on our platform.
Neel
Hi, my name is Neel Tamhane and this is the Foundry Conversation podcast. Today’s guest is Vijay, he’s, the co-founder and CEO at GramVaani (Onion Development Technologies Private Ltd), a social technology enterprise that builds innovative, voice based community media technologies for the underserved with a mission to reverse the flow of information, working closely with communities and partners across the sectors. GramVaani has touched over 2.5 million people around the world, enabling them not just to access and share life impacting information but also voice their opinions or ask questions.
A seasoned technology and technology for Development professional having worked over 17 years in this space, Vijay also is a part of the founder community and became an Acumen India Fellow in 2020.
Welcome, Vijay and super excited to hear more about your work and the stories that pertain to that. Thankfully, I’ve known you in person and I think I wanted to start off the podcast with sharing some of the stories that you’ve been telling me about in the past and also sharing it with a larger foundry community so that more people could hear about what you’ve been up to.
So maybe if you could just dive into telling us about what is the biggest problem they are tackling and what are the innovations that you see that you’ve been working with that could help us cater and take information to a different level through the platform of Gram Vaani and the different platforms that you’ve been building over the last few years.
Vijay
Thanks a lot, Neel. Wonderful to be on this podcast and very glad to be having this opportunity to share the stories of GramVaani and the work that we’ve been able to do and continue to do in this particular domain. As you would have seen in the examples I mentioned earlier, we’ve seen cases of individual level impact, community level impact and even institutional policy level impact as well. And what do we learn from these stories is that the primary gap that exists, if you’re actually calling it, is information as power, then we believe, we at GramVaani believe, that a very large segment of the population is actually deprived of access to this power, the power to access the right & contextual information, the power to make use of this information to make informed decisions about critical aspects of their life, aspects which can impact their and their family’s lives and their own communities and opportunities for better living.
So MobileVaani’s mission is actually to reverse the flow of information. It is to challenge socioeconomic ideologies and norms that are actually responsible for the reproduction of all forms of inequality. And how do we propose to do it? It is by providing a community media platform which is easy to use, which is relatable and where there is contextual and complete information for the benefit of the communities or the people, we have to do it with some level of support, some level of services that we provide for the community.
These are tools and platforms that we offer to the communities and empower them to use these platforms for their context or need, rather than trying to impose our thoughts, our ideas, our understanding of the use of the platforms. So the forms of inequality that we’re most concerned about include both wealth and income inequality, gender based inequality, caste based inequality. Now, these inequalities are actually reproduced by various socio economic ideologies, norms like you know, patriarchy, caste hierarchy. The feudalism. These inequalities in turn manifest themselves in various forms, right? In terms of gaps in education, gaps in health, nutrition, access to information. And this very specific access to information is what we at GramVaani are trying to address in a critical way, and we believe that is the pathway to being better informed, making better choices, and most importantly, demand for better access to services and quality of services, and most importantly, in terms of allowing people to realize their capabilities and to live fulfilling lives we’re working on. Right. And many of these inequalities can be addressed by policies. But in a democratic set up. As I said, these policies have to be demanded by people and they will only demand these policies and changes only when they are better informed, and they’re better aware.
And there’s a shared understanding of why these problems exist at all and through the mobile vaani platform. This is what we are trying to do by providing a shared platform where people can discuss, understand, and deliberate on many of these topics. And this shared understanding can then lead to collective action. And that is the ideology or theory of change that has developed over the years of experience, working closely with the community.
MobileVaani’s mission is actually to reverse the flow of information. It is to challenge socioeconomic ideologies and norms that are actually responsible for the reproduction of all forms of inequality.
Neel
What’s most powerful about the platform and whenever I’ve talked to you about this is that you’re completely changing the narrative on how information flows, you’re engaging with the community and giving the power back into their own hands and being responsible for the community and the information that’s propagated, especially today’s day and age, where concerns around misinformation have been a big conversation and topic that we’ve been discussing. I think another question that I really have for you is what’s your why, what inspires you to get up every day and work on something like this?
Vijay
Absolutely. Neel , I think you touched upon a very important aspect. I mean, what really motivates us? Why should we do? Who are we to be doing all this for communities? As I said, these platforms, these tools are an aspect right of the overall effort to try and empower the communities. But what really matters is when the communities start taking ownership of these tools platforms and they leverage it to their own benefit, in a contextual manner, and that while technology does play a critical role where we constantly strive using new innovations and technology by various aspects of voice technology that we work in using AI, Ml based tools, etc. Data digitization tools, et cetera. But what really matters is how do the communities use these technologies of tools and how do we as an organization, support them by helping build capacity, helping them understand the benefits of these platforms or tools and how they can use it in their own way. Every community varies in terms of the context in terms of the challenges in terms of the issues. What is important is to feed these tools, platforms and technologies into the context of these communities.
So, why do we even do this? As I said in terms of if there is a call for help through a voice recorded on the platform indicating the pain and exploitation experience by a young girl, which leads to a timely intervention and saves a precious life, saves a young girl from committing suicide. A young girl gets inspired by stories of positive change and her decision by a elder sister to delay her marriage until she gets to a marriageable age. And it inspires this young girl to study further and wants to become a police officer. Listening to this kind of a story, a call for help recorded on the platform leads to a local volunteer reaching out to the family during the pandemic time when the family could not get access to any other form of relief for local support and they did not have a morsel of rice to eat. If our platform has given the people the voice to reach out for help, and it has helped the local volunteers and local organizations to reach out to them in a timely manner and provide them with food and support.
And if it has saved the family’s life, and I think these are the stories that really make us wake up more confident, feeling more humbled and with an opportunity to really make that small difference so that we can. And I think these are the stories of change impact at the individual level, community level and institutional level that really drive and give us that reason to continue persist despite the challenges, despite the difficulties we are working with this very objective of reducing this information asymmetry that that’s prevalent amongst the rural and low income urban and urban communities.
I mean, this is over the years we have seen how information acquired through the MV platform or the MobileVaani platform has helped people in transforming their life belonging drivers, groups of farmers, landless labor and organized sector workers, women physically challenged individuals, improving the nutrition of mothers and small children, changing their behavior patterns and their understanding of financial inclusion involving women in terms of decision making of families, sexual and reproductive rights of all the same employment opportunities for physically disabled people, career counseling of youth treatment of migrants in cities.
I think the uniqueness of our platform has been how it has been used across the sectors, agnostic of these sectors and how it can be adopted and used in these various contexts
Neel
During pandemic when you talk about social media and all the mental health issues that it has kind of propagated, especially with young adolescents in comparison to that the story that you just told us about in terms of child marriage being a big issue which still exists in geographies like India, and how a platform like this would completely transform and change the narrative and empower the girl to go ahead and study and continue her life as she would as she deserves to. But work like this doesn’t come without challenges and I think what we are also very curious to understanding from all the founding members that we’re talking to is what is that one challenge that you’re currently facing as a leader? And how are you navigating and wrestling with that while you are trying to build this platform and increase the growth of something like this?
Vijay
Absolutely, Neel, I think let me take the liberty of mentioning not one, but probably two, and I’m sure there are many and the Foundry members would all probably relate to a lot of this. That it is not specific to our own platform or technology or business. So I think it is more important about how entrepreneurs and space and on a daily basis. One very important challenge, if I may call it a challenge, is that in the quest of despite fighting bigger challenges, achieving bigger, making these bigger aspects that we all want to achieve, we often miss out and don’t acknowledge enough the importance and relevance of providing the rightful attention to smaller details, the seemingly more mundane underlying aspects that maybe may not realize enough but actually form some of the most critical building blocks of the foundation that we are talking about and we are trying to build and we may well hope to achieve those big dreams on.
For example, I give you examples of that, empathy in terms of technology and program design, being more sensitive while defining and implementing people and related processes both internally and at the community level, taking into account the social, cultural and economic nuances by designing content by creating content. We create technology, we create great products mostly from a top down approach, and that’s the problem of the general industry. But do we take into account the issues and nuances of context of the community? And do we integrate them as part of the design process and many of these aspects, including the importance of values like integrity, mutual trust?
I think these are some of the underlying and foundational aspects, seemingly small but extremely important aspects that we kind of miss and do not give enough attention to. I believe that we need to stay grounded with our itinerary blue to the ground while still preparing for the longer run and knowing which aspects to focus on which aspects do we spend enough time on? While we are focusing on the long run is a major challenge, and that does not come through external coaching or anything of that thing.
You need to pick up many of these skills while you are on the run. That’s one challenge.
Neel
You bring up this amazing point around empathy. And I think when the Acumen Academy also runs these different courses on say things like design thinking, empathy is such a simple sounding word and sounds very relatable for everyone. But bringing that into your daily practice in terms of working on different projects, especially something as pertinent as yours and as important and sensitive as yours can be completely path breaking and game changing in terms of how you design your systems and products around it.
Vijay
Absolutely.
Neel
I’d also love to kind of nudge a little further to try and understand how you’ve been working at ground money navigating all of these different challenges. But I’m sure you’ve also faced certain deadlocks in the past, and I’m sure it doesn’t come without any failures in the past from which you have learned. And so we’d love to also hear about what your biggest failures have been and what you’ve learned from it.
Vijay
Absolutely. And I think these challenges that I’m talking about are probably I don’t think I can claim to have solved these challenges or have answers to these challenges as yet. But as I said, you learn the skills on the ground and you learn how to navigate some of these challenges as we progress in our journey as entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs. I think these learnings come from these failures and very rightfully, these failures happen to be very important stepping stones for pretty much all of us. Again. I will touch back again at the same point of the key failures or rather incidents or situations that I have seen is when we were focusing on something very big in terms of fundraising or in terms of raising investment for the organization.
We focus on all the big things, the big vision for the organization and all those aspects, some very underlying aspects, very fundamental aspects that we should have been more cautious about. We should have been taking more notice of. We seem to have probably missed that. Right. And again, as I said, these are all learnings in hindsight. But I think we know for a fact that if we had spent more time, more effort and more focus on these underlying smaller details, I think the outcome of that effort would have been different. Right? And I think that was probably one of the biggest lessons in my entrepreneurial journey and the other aspect. It also reflects and manifests itself in our desire to achieve perfection in design, in development and in delivery. We often order the importance of timely and contextual distribution of services. What is the point of developing a super fantastic and super interesting UI and UX for an app to service COVID information when it speaks right. So I think we have to know where we have to, what we don’t know, we have to know where to invest our efforts, our time and where there is a real need for what is the role of perfection in design, development or delivery.
V is-à-vis the timely delivery of services or products, and I think that these are some learnings that we continue to learn from. I don’t claim, as I said, having achieved success or what are these challenges, but we continue to learn from it. And we hopefully we are becoming better at that particular aspect.
Neel
It takes an immense amount of humility and this whole identity of just learning from the failures and learning from things that haven’t worked out. Also, it takes a lot to keep this consistent throughout the journey that you’ve had, and you’ve been working in this space for the last 17 years, and you still continue to have the humility to keep learning more and acknowledging the fact that you could still make mistakes and learn from them to do better next time. I think that’s super inspiring.
But before we conclude this conversation as well, I’m also very keen on putting you on the spot and asking you a few questions that I hope that you give either one phrase answers or short answers to to even hear how you think as a leader, because I think really, when you’re on the hot seat and you have to make these quick decisions, which you I’m sure have had to make multiple off in the past. It’s nice to hear how you think about things like that, but this is more of a fun section that we have in the podcast as well.
So I’m going to dive straight to it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on some of these things. So here comes the first one.
What’s one value that you care most about?
Vijay
Integrity
Neel
What have you found consistently most inspiring?
Vijay
Persistence
Neel
For these last questions? We are going to each complete these sentences in a rapid fire manner. Communities are amazing because ___________
Vijay
they just reflect the whole context of human values.
The reason for living the value of love.
Neel
Wow, that was amazing.
One cartoon character that you love the most.
Vijay
Mickey Mouse
Neel
Someone who inspires you_______
Vijay
I think my guru, my lord, Bhagwan Shri Sathya Sai Babaa the core of values that I have imbibed, I think, comes from his teachings and having had the blessing of being his student and studying at his Institute.
Neel
Success is _______
Vijay
I think the clouded form of I think it’s just one phase of life.
Neel
I love the humility that you talk with.
I’m most proud of _______
Vijay
I think the privileges that I’ve been blessed with
Neel
Thanks a lot. This was super exciting and the stories that you are sharing with us mean a lot. And I’m really hoping that we get to hear more such stories from other Foundry members around the world. And I’m sure we can also find some ideas and cross pollinate these ideas and recreate more such organizations such as Yourself and you can set an example for other leaders around the world to learn and also co-learn together while we build more such enterprises around the world.
Vijay
Absolutely, Neel. It was indeed a pleasure talking to you and thank you so much for this opportunity. And I do hope that I get to learn more from being part of this wonderful community of inspiring people. Thank you so much.
Neel
The music for Foundry Conversations was composed by Amadeus Foundation and recorded by Amadeus String Youth Orchestra in Bello, Colombia. Amadeus cultivates the emotional intelligence of children and young people at high social risk through music addressing their need for social inclusiveness.
Do you want to listen more Foundry Conversations? Click on the following links to meet more Foundry members and their work to build they are doing to build a more just, inclusive and sustainable world:
- Episode 1: Meet The Hosts.
- Episode 2: Platforms for Activism with Irene Milleiro.
- Episode 3: Mental Health Care in India with Rashi Vidyasagar.
- Episode 4: Stories of Sexual, Reproductive and Health Rights in Bangladesh with Syeda Samara Mortada.
- Episode 5: Launching African Creatives with Chidi Nwaogu.
- Episode 7: A Transformative Youth Orchestra in Colombia with Daniela Ocampo.
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