Inclusive Employment through Assistance

Across the world only 15% of the Persons with Disabilities have access to Assistive Aids, mainly because these devices are not affordable as more than 90% of the PwDs come from Low Income households. The situation leads to higher dependence of PwDs on their families and well wishers thereby limiting their education & employment outreach. 

At TorchIt, we design effective & affordable solutions for Persons with Disabilities in order to provide them the ecosystem and independence they need to lead empowered lives. Our devices are assembled & distributed in partnership with PwDs thereby creating an ecosystem to generate employment for the beneficiary community as well.  

World over there are more than a billion suffering from some form disabilities being visual, hearing or locomotive impairment which means almost 16% of our population are under performing and leading dependent lives due to lack of affordable assistive aids being available for them.

TorchIt had started its journey with providing accurate navigation aid for the blind which helps them walk independently in any kind of setup with complete ease. We have more than 25,000 users across the world with major focus in developing countries being India & Africa. Our other devices are also focused towards making Education inclusive for the visually, hearing & locomotive impaired communities through different utilitarian solutions. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16kxL3ofucGsS3IAerCS5EeTXi_v2Qgvj/view  

Our product-first "Saarthi", provides "99.7% Obstacle Detection Accuracy in all possible setups including closed rooms (within 2 feet), lobbies (within 4 feet) and streets & open areas (within 8 feet). Saarthi is ergonomically designed, battery efficient device that can be used standalone or can be attached to any white cane. Video Link

eBraille which is Assistive device for empowering visually impaired people to access and create any content through the on-device file management system, wireless keyboard to support mobile integration to perform functions and typing through Bluetooth enabled capabilities and the feature to convert any text to audio and have any audio file listened on the device. 

Our Third product; VOIS - Smart gloves for the people suffering from hearing impairment, it provides them with the capability to interact with anyone through gesture-based communication powered by the audio output on a smartwatch and also to understand what the other person is communicating through TTS Text are available on the watch screen. Video Link

Our products provide the much needed assistance to build an essence of independence in the lives of Persons with Disabilities so that they can engage & contribute to the society and have equal opportunity at making a difference in their lives and lives of millions of others through their contributions in work & actions.

Till now, we have impacted more than 25,000 people across India, Kenya, Ethiopia,Tanzania, South Korea, Turkey & the US, with more than 150 Differently Abled people who have contributed in our assembly & more than 400 trainers who are actively contributing to growing our impact and their financial sustainability through employing with us. 

Our objective is to brew the ideal ecosystem that can enable & empower PwDs to explore, engage & employ in this world thereby making their valiant contributions across different fields of work. 

The objective of our organisation is building physical & financial sustenance in the lives of Persons with Disabilities across the globe through our products, community & employment engagements. As we understood the dimension that we are applying in MIT Solve focuses towards powering sustained inclusion for PwDs and that aligns to our core belief of having independence & inclusion for PwDs in academia, workforce & all walks of lives thereby providing them the ecosystem so that they can to the fields of their likings with utmost enthusiasm and commitment without any bondage, dependence or bias.   

Our essence of Innovation is drawn from designing effective but affordable assistive aid as we believe if the solution is not affordable it lacks the ability to create the impact considering 90% of PwDs are from Low income households therefore the solution to reach the maximum number of beneficiaries has to be affordable. The other innovative approach that we have tried to follow is participative building & scaling i.e. all our products are designed, developed and distributed in participation from PwDs thereby making utilitarian products by PwDs and for the PwDs.

Our core technology is frugal innovation through sonar, AI and design thinking for making  any and every product most utilitarian and at the same time affordable too.

The proof of the pudding is in the impact we have already created in the lives of more than 25,000 people with employment generation for more than 150 PwDs in our own assembly & 400 trainers for training & distribution.

Our theory of change is Inclusive & utilitarian Tech at affordable pricing for maximum impact and empowerment. 

We currently have more than 25,000 users with an intent to capture another 40,000 by end of next year and a million more by the end of next 5 years

The goal for the next year is to have more awareness & engagement campaigns across different states & countries to increase user participation & impact while the longer term objective remains to design & distribute more impactful yet affordable products for PwDs.

Our current short term barriers are user engagement generation while the long term barriers shall be coming up with innovative & affordable solutions to capture assistance accessibility in different domains of lives of PwDs.

We intend to overcome our barriers with participation from the community and the grit that we have shown for the cause for the last 4 years.

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Our team is a blend of seasoned professionals and young talent both immensely connected to the cause and what creates a differentiating factor for our team is the great bonding & grit we display amongst ourselves and as an organisation while enjoying great support in the form of engagement & feedback from the user community.

We have more than 100+ NGO partners across the world and more than 20 venture partners. Our partners include Blind Peoples Association, National Association for the Blinds, Blind Relief Association, Facebook, ONGC, Tata Trust, Lockheed Martin, USAID, UKAID and many more.

Our NGO partners support us in user identification & distribution while our venture partners act as sponsors and funders for the cause.

Our business model is fairly simple engage with CSR & State partners to secure impact projects for distributing devices for the PwDs whilst also providing the devices for end users to be bought from their own pockets.

The value proposition we provide for the corporates & state is the essence of impact & building independence, empowerment & inclusion in the society whilst the end user get utilitarian and affordable assistive devices for making their lives independent and sustained.   

Financial sustainability is baked into our approach and conduct as we understand if we can't put food at the tables of our team we wouldn't be able to sustain the impact for our community. We operate at a thin operating margin of 25% which helps keep the team financially suatained and have the essence of affordability in our devices.

The advantage of connecting with a platform like Solve is one gets access to the network that help an idea reach out to a larger community whilst also providing an enabling ecosystem to build and grow impact at scale. Our idea of MIT Solve is as an enabler for impact and that is what we intend to gain. 

We seek mentorship, network & resources support to grow our impact story with a sustained global outreach

We are looking for NGO partners across the world ken to work in the disabilities space and we are also looking for venture partners who can help in providing sponsorship or access to create awareness and impact around the differently abled community. 

Our entire premise is Solutions by the differently abled and by the differently abled which we have demonstrated & propagated through our 150 resources engaged in assembly and more than 400 as trainers thereby building the essence of sustained employment/entrepreneurship in the lives of differently abled people. We also offer franchise models where a differently abled person can team up with an NGO and assemble devices and proliferate impact in the community.