Vijay Sai Pratap

Change agent, Concerned citizen, Connector, Engineer, Entrepreneur, Foodie, Parent, Social entrepreneur

Am an eternal optimist, a Telecom and Technology for Development professional for close to 22 years, I am an Engineering graduate from the University of Madras and hold a Master’s in Business Administration (Sri Sathya Sai Institute of Higher Learning, India) and Business law (National Law School of India University, India). I am an Acumen India 2020 fellow. Have played key roles across functions, from strategic partnerships to product innovations, Tech-program management & Regulatory liaison in the Telecom & ICT for development sectors. Co-founded Gram Vaani ('Voice of the village' in Hindi), an award-winning social tech enterprise in 2015, working to build inclusive, community led conversation spaces through appropriate communication technologies & tools for the underserved. Mobile Vaani is Gram Vaani’s answer to a ‘Social networking platform’ for the underserved. Operating as a federated network of participatory platforms or ‘community commons’, Mobile Vaani as a multi-channel voice enabled, digital safe space, drives contextual conversations around topics like Climate, Agriculture, gender, health, governance etc. accessible even through a simple phone call. The hyperlocal platforms & a distributed architecture are active in over 120 provinces in India with a potential reach of over 8Mn+ households anchored by 1400+ volunteers & powered over a million community voices till date, enabling users to not just access and share life impacting information, but also voice their opinions or ask questions. Gram Vaani has touched over 5 million individuals till date and worked with over 250+ organizations across domains, further expanding its digital reach @500K+ Web app visitors till date. Information is indeed power and everyone, without discrimination deserves to be heard, but sadly close to 3 billion people globally lack equitable access to digital platforms. This gap leaves countless voices unheard and excluded due to barriers like poor literacy and other socio-cultural factors. Building an empathetic state requires a communication infrastructure that facilitates feedback and fair representation of diverse viewpoints, yet low-income and marginalized communities lack access to such platforms, hindering awareness and participation in governance processes. Technology can be used as a powerful lever to set many things right: address inequities, improve democratic governance, accelerate knowledge sharing. However, technology needs to be built specifically for the poor and marginalized with appropriate structures & processes, otherwise it tends to exacerbate inequality. A community-based approach may be a more robust and equitable pathway for empowerment through technology. As an accidental entrepreneur, was pained by the lack of such transformational bottom-up alternatives, that fired us onto this mission to reverse the flow of information, leveraging the power of Community anchored technology platforms & tools. To clearly outline the importance of community-based technologies, and distinguish them from individual service-based technologies, we are conceptualizing our past and ongoing work as a new category of DPIs/DPGs, for communities. This category of community-based tech is of high relevance especially in today’s climate crisis. Our new technology innovation called CoRE (Commoning for Resilience & Equality) stack plays a crucial role in fostering learning and decentralized decision-making for climate resilience in rural communities. Developed as an open-source Digital Public Good, using AI assisted participatory methods for rural communities pursuing rain-fed agriculture in India, it aims to improve small farmer household incomes and build resilience through improved Natural Resource Management. Read about our work on the CoRE stack (https://core-stack.org/). Gram Vaani's 'Thought leadership in conceptualizing the use of technology at the community interface'. Through interactions and work over the years with hundreds of stakeholders and even a book authored by our co-founder, Gram Vaani has shaped the thinking of how technology in general should be conceptualized and designed to bring impact, especially at the community interface. (Read more about the book - Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists, by Aaditeshwar Seth, Sep-2022: https://www.cse.iitd.ac.in/~aseth/act.html)

Learning & exploring further at the intersections of Community, Technology & Social innovation. I am a Lawn Tennis enthusiast, foodie, animal lover, observer, am inspired by beautiful poetry and moved by the power of music, compassion, and the love of God.

To reverse the flow of information by providing inclusive, community anchored digital conversation spaces for the underserved and amplify the next billion voices for inclusive change.

The world we believe needs more of well-intended and equitable conversations, don’t we, especially In today’s time and age of disparities & extreme conflict? TED talks about ‘Possibilities’ of discovering and spreading ideas that spark conversation, deepen understanding and drive meaningful change. It very rightly points out ‘‘Much of today’s public conversation is eaten up by zero-sum battles between divided groups. It refers to the opportunity & responsibility to explore together a strange and beautiful space called the adjacent possible’. We are inspired & stoked by this dream and infact have been in a different form possibly, committed to this vision for over a decade now as an organization with a mission to reverse the flow of information, emphasizing the need to leverage responsible tech to build meta-social good infrastructures to make public conversations more inclusive, that further strengthens democracy through pluralism and structures of accountability and transparency. Pluralism to listen to diverse voices, learn from them, and change one’s preferences based on these insights, is what we will all acknowledge drives true participatory democracy. An opportunity to build friendships, inspired connections and contribute meaningfully, towards a more responsible today and a brighter tomorrow.

Whistling a tune, diplomacy, I can write well (sometimes)...lending a patient ear, am said to be irritatingly patient but am also painfully persistent :-) so guess I don't easily give up...