Indic AI Foundation for Social Good

I am the Co-founder and CEO of Indic AI Foundation for Social Good. At Indic AI, my responsibilities are partnering with Training Institutes and NGOs and managing the overall operations.

Earlier, I was the co-founder of Edupristine (Neev Knowledge Management). Edupristine is one of the largest training institutes for working professionals in India. In the 10 years of entrepreneurial and managerial experience with Edupristine, I was primarily responsible for business strategy and sales. Edupristine was sold to Adtalem Global Education (ATGE – NYSE) in 2018.

I am also running an NGO since 2016 for 250 underprivileged children in Gurgaon, India for enrolling them in CBSE English Medium schools.

I am an alumnus of Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, India and College of Business Studies, University of Delhi.

Problem:As per World Bank, over a billion people, about 15% of the world's population, have some form of disability. Persons with disabilities are more likely to experience adverse socioeconomic outcomes than persons without disabilities, such as less education, poorer health outcomes, lower levels of employment, and higher poverty rates.

Our Solution: Indic AI Foundation focus is on solving challenges that prevent education and employment mainstreaming of differently abled individuals. We are proposing affordable high-quality education using online AI & Tech solutions to make it accessible and  scalable in a cost effective way. 

Inclusion and diversity:  Our project aims for inclusion of differently-abled in schools and colleges as students and teachers and in companies as owners and employees. An inclusive and accessible education system  is the backbone to achieve the same.

Problem: Despite 5% reservation in public sector employment, the share of employment of differently abled in all posts remains at 0.44%, that too mainly in Grade C and D jobs. The employment share in private sector is also estimated at a poor 0.3%. Most of these seats are vacant because of unavailability of suitable and skilled candidates. 

Root Cause: The curriculum and learning materials adapted to the special learning needs of differently-abled - both in content and format - are not readily available. Mainstream content is typically not in an accessible format. Infact, most of the Learning and Education platform of training providers are not friendly to people with disabilities. Differently-abled individuals, therefore, are at a disadvantage as compared to other candidates for academic performance, competitive exams as well as employment. 

Inspiring Innovation: Our objective is to develop Tech and AI solutions to make the mainstream content accessible to differently-abled individuals and aid in skill development required for academics, exams and professional excellence.

Our main projects include developing and deploying following products:

1.Indic AI Education Platform: A disabled friendly education platform that provides accessible mainstream content. The content would be: 

a) Open: Free content is sourced from our collaborations with leading education institutes in India. The content is made accessible and then provided on our Education Platform. The content is designed for self-learning of academic, professional and job-oriented courses. 

b) Pro: Post self-learning courses, the students who require advanced training may enrol for pro courses that provide focussed training for specific competitive exams or job profiles. These are paid courses that we would subsidise using donations and CSR funds. 

2.Indic AI Access Tech Solution: We are using Deep Learning and Technology based solutions to reduce the cost footprint of making content accessible and to make our offerings scalable. For this, we are training Deep Learning models to make digital audio, video, ebooks and test series content accessible. Our models are trained on domain-specific Indian education content, ensuring our models have low error rates as compared to commercial models on the local content. We plan to use our models in-house as well as license it to third parties to financially support our operations.

In Indic AI , we are working on a solution for over 1 billion disabled people, not having access to quality education. As per World Bank, about 15% of the world's population, have some form of disability. Persons with disabilities are more likely to experience adverse socioeconomic outcomes, such as less education, lower levels of employment and higher poverty rates.

We have created an accessible platform that solves the challenges of education and employment mainstreaming of differently abled individuals. Indic AI education is a free Online platform which provides high quality education for academic , professional, and job-oriented courses for self-learning of students and support resources for teachers of disabled students.

Online accessible education will ensure higher inclusion and employment for the disabled in the mainstream world. That’s one billion people looking for accessible education for their inclusion.

Obviously, we want a solution to address them all, but our initial focus is India that has 8% of the world’s disabled population and where the employment of disabled is less than .5%.  Beyond that , we are creating strong processes and using technology solutions that will help us to scale in other counties in a cost-effective way. 

Indic AI, is not just an education platform that will use AI and technology solutions, to provide high quality education to disabled.  

It's a revolution that will impact 2 hundred thousand differently-abled individuals in next 5 years, and many of these users will become the role model for their community. 

When we educate a "girl child we educate a family", but when "we educate a disabled, they inspire the entire community". 

The tech and ML solutions will help us to scale this platform for other countries that lack accessible quality education for differently abled.

I visited Saksham NGO to meet some visually impaired children and the teacher introduced me to some of her bright students who wanted to clear Indian Institute of Technology entrance exam. Reema, a 9th class student was so passionate that she wants to learn Machine Learning, so that she can solve the education accessibility challenges of the visually impaired. Another student Pranam from 9th class, was the topper in his inclusion school.

As we interacted with more students, we realised it was the unavailability of right guidance and accessible material that makes it difficult for students to pursue higher education.

Thus our new journey started to find a scalable and cost-effective solution that can help the differently-abled children of India to achieve their highest potential.

India as a country has the potential to provide "Human Capital" to the whole world. The private sector education is limited to the top of the pyramid and  public sector education at school level lacks quality. 

As an Edtech entrepreneur, I always felt that all the children, irrespective of their family income should have access to quality education and guidance. 

So, we started working with the differently-abled, as they are the most neglected. Working with differently-abled students is a huge personal motivation and an amazing learning experience. You get encouraged to see how they are so passionately working towards their goals, despite having minimal resources and negative ambiance that surrounds them. Their inclusion and mainstreaming will also increase the productivity of the abled people, as shown by various reports. 

Further, once we make the platform accessible to differently-abled, we will make it available in local Indian languages, so that the education platform can also be used by the underprivileged students. We would also scale the solution to other countires for high quality education of the disabled. 

We are two Co-founders and as a core team , we have the required experience and passion to deliver this project.

Sarita Chand is co-founder of Indic AI and she is heading the operations, marketing and alliances stream. Prior to Indic AI,she was the Co-founder of Edupristine, one of the leading professional training institutes in India, where she was the Head of Sales and Business Strategy. Her experience of running a successful EdTech startup for 10 years, will be instrumental in managing and scaling up our operations. 

Neha Shivran is co-founder of Indic AI and she is heading the Technology and Artificial Intelligence stream. She is responsible for conceptualizing, training and deploying deep learning models, managing technical team and coordinating with technology vendors. She has over 10 years of experience in data science, analytics and financial industry. Previously, she was Director of Risk and Analytics at Lenddo EFL India, an alternate data startup. She has also worked as Head of Custom Modeling with India’s largest credit bureau. She is an Engineer from NSIT, Delhi and MBA from Cranfield University, UK.

We, therefore, have expertise in setting up, managing and scaling up operations in the Edtech startup. 

At Edupristine after strategic funding from Kaizen private equity and Adtalem Global education, the focus of Edupristine changed from growth to profitability. As part of this the International operations of Edupristine were closed and we had to layoff 20% of our sales force. 

I was heading the Business development and strategy. With 80% of the resources, we had to achieve Indian sales to accommodate the forgone 20% of the International sales revenue and 20% year-on-year growth in the Indian sales revenue as well.

We took various initiatives to improve the sales processes and increased the sales productivity of our employees by 45% and achieved our targets.   

I left my dream job in Goldman Sachs to start Edupristine in 2007, it became successful with the pilot launch. 3 of my trainers cum friends left their investment banking and private banking jobs to join me in Edupristine. It became the leading professional training institutes in India to provide practical skills that were required in finance, accounts, health care, analytics and marketing. We grew from team of four in 2007 to over 200 by 2017.

I was leading the sales and marketing team of over 150 individuals during this time period. All the sales managers were in-house trained counselors who were groomed to lead a team of 15 to 20 employees. They were empowered with trainings, analytics and decision making. Thus sales team motivation and morale was always high and they mostly achieved their targets. 

Now in Indic AI, I am again following the same approach of collaborating, delegating  and developing relations with training institutes, corporates and NGOs, so that within 1 year of launch we help at least 5,000 disabled students, to achieve their highest potential.This approach of empowering and trusting others will help us to scale faster in a cost effective way.

Not applicable

Indic AI Education is the only disabled friendly learning platform in India. We want to leverage the new technology and algorithms to reach a much wider audience. Further we would license our AI and technology solutions to help corporates, education institutes, course providers etc. to convert their existing content into accessible format. 

Though there are guidelines from government on making the education accessible for people with disability, most of the existing course providers’ online platforms and content do not pass accessibility tests, as they do not consider individuals with disability as a viable target market segment. 

Implementation of the Universal Design of Learning in Indian education system is also negligible. We are forming alliances and partnership to leverage the existing content and infrastructure. We are tying up with multiple NGOs to ensure high student enrolment rate, course providers to add more courses and with professionals, mentors to guide our students and corporates to provide internships and employment. We are also putting in place a unique financing structure to ensure high course completion rate.

Indic AI provides  easy to use , accessible education resources for the disabled students and their teachers. This includes accessible learning resources and courses for academic, professional and job preparation. Our immediate goal is to provide accessible content and mentoring to enable the disabled students to achieve their highest potential . These immediate goals are linked to our long-term outcome of providing accessible education to  the 1 billion disabled people worldwide.  

To test some of the links we carried out a pilot with visually impaired students in India. Results show that students having access to accessible mainstream content perform equally as sighted students and there is a significant improvement in their morale and academic performance.  

Indic AI Education pilot started in Feb 2020. We have 150 visually impaired active users from our pilot launch. 67% of them are using the Indic AI Pro and 34% are enrolled for Indic AI Open. As on May 2020, we have 500 plus visually impaired students enrolled with us from Tier 1 cities in India.

FY 2021 (March 2020 to April 2021): 1250 students for Indic AI Pro and 5000 students for Indic AI Open.

FY21-FY25: Our target is to reach 1.9 million cumulative enrolments covering 0.2 million students and enable 10,000 differently abled individuals to find employment. 

We aim to achieve following short-term and long-term results by end of 2020 and 2025 

2020: 

a) Hours of accessible content: 2000 hours with 100+ courses.

b) Total students: 6250+ students 

c) Revenue: USD 20,000 

2025:

a) Hours of accessible content: 50,000 hours, with 1200+ courses

b) Total students: ~1.9 million course enrollments (1.8 million in free courses, 0.1 million in Paid) 

c) Revenue: USD 1.3 million (from commission on sales of Paid courses and licensing of our Deep Learning models).

This is going to work because of following factors: 

Our collaboration approach: At organisation level, we understand that lot of resources already exist with private institutions, corporates, NGOs and collaborating with them will enable us to make our operations commercially viable. We do not intend to reinvent something which already exists. For instance, we do not want to enter content creation space but want to invest on how to make existing content accessible.

Innovation: We believe that Tech and Deep Learning would allow us to achieve our goals impact lives of millions in a cost effective way.

Core Team: Sarita has domain expertise in Education and Training sector and Neha has domain expertise in application of Machine Learning on real-life datasets.

Enabling laws in India: as per Person With Disability Act 2016, all the public and private infrastructure and education should be completely accessible for disabled by June 2019.

Increasing awareness: in companies for inclusion and diversity. Moreover, corporate support is increasing due to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Act.

We envisage following challenges in our journey:

Academic Collaboration for Content: The leading training institutes might be apprehensive to share their content with Indic AI, as they may not connect to the cause or may fear content leakage to other students etc.

Technology and AI solutions: Our biggest challenge is creating/finding datasets for developing and fine-tuning deep learning and machine learning models.

Change in orientation: The biggest challenge is to transform the thought process of differently-abled students. Due to reservations in the government sector, most of them aspire for Government jobs only and the exams conducted for them are not in accessible format. We want to empower our students to be able to find jobs in private sector and excel in their job performance.

Managing dropout rate  would be a key challenge as courses are online.

Financial: We will be dependent on external cash flows initially as our internal operating cash flows would be negative.

Schools: It will be difficult to convince schools , to allow external institutes to set up the online infrastructure for English, maths, science and logical reasoning classes. 

To mitigate the above barriers, we will use the following approach  

Academic collaborations for content: India is experiencing a big surge in the online and self-learning training portals resulting in training providers offering 10% - 50% of their content for Free. Our first target is to make this content accessible. As the content is free, training providers would be less hesitant to provide us the same content for our accessible learning platform.

Technology and AI solutions: we are using open-source datasets and data provided by our academic collaborators to train algorithms.

Change in Orientation: We would be offering large number of courses to improve job-oriented skills such as Digital Marketing, Accounting, Coding, Computer Literacy etc.

High dropout rate/Low course completion rate: We are designing and implementing a mentorship program to ensure that first-time students on our platform have access to a mentor who can personally guide them.

Financial: Though we are a NGO, we want to be self sufficient by generating inhouse revenues to support our organisation in long run. We would follow a hybrid approach by generating inhouse revenues and raising grants/CSR funds. In short and medium term we need grants and CSR funds to support our operations. By FY26 we would become cash profitable. Further, most of our expenses are variable in nature, thus we can plan our operations based on the funding raised from CSR and grants.

Schools: It is difficult and expensive for school to find good teachers, so they should find our solutions useful. 

1. Training Institutes: Few of the leading training institutes in India have already partnered with us: 

a) CL Educate Limited: for Law and MBA exams. www.careerlauncher.com 

b) Vedantu: for maths and science courses. https://www.vedantu.com/ 

c) Adda247: for government exam courses. https://www.adda247.com/ 

d) Allen Career Institute: for IIT JEE preparation, and material for Maths and Science courses (from 9 to 12 class) 

e) Edupristine: for finance and accounting courses. https://www.edupristine.com/ 

f) Digital Vidya: for digital marketing courses www.digitalvidya.com 

g) Kredent Academy: for finance planning courses. www.kredentacademy.com 

h) Chandoo.org for MS Excel courses. http://chandoo.org/ 

i) Career Guide: for Career Counselling. www.careerguide.com 

2. NGOs: we have tied up with NGOs for students onboarding and for training content 

a) Vision AID for python, computer literacy and accessibility trainings https://www.visionaid.org/ 

b) Saksham NGO for student onboarding and Daisy Consortium Online courses http://saksham.org/ 

c) National Association of Blind for student onboarding. http://www.nabdelhi.in/ 

d) Blind 2 Visionary for Maths and Science Trainings http://blind2visionary.org/

We do not design special courses for differently-abled students. Rather, we convert the mainstream courses provided by leading training providers into  accessible format using AI and tech solutions. This helps our disabled students them to compete with others and achieve their full academic potential. Indic AI Education Platform provides students access to three category of courses: 

a) Academic courses: Courses for classes I to XII. 

b) Competitive exams: In India, there are competitive exams for higher education seats (such as JEE, GRE, MBA, CLAT, CA), public sector jobs (such as exams for Bank Probationary Officer, UPSC, Teaching) and private sector jobs (such as quantitative abilities, english communication, computer literacy). We are forming alliances and partnerships with training providers for competitive exams to make their content accessible to differently-abled students who are pursuing higher education or who are looking for employment.

c) Professional courses: These courses are meant for people with disabilities that are looking for skill development to either enter the job market or perform better on existing jobs. These courses cover areas such as coding, digital marketing, accounting, financial analysis etc. 

Therefore, our solution caters to development of academic as well as job-oriented skills of differently-abled individuals in age group 5 to 29 years.

The solutions are provided in online format, the students can learn using mobile phones or laptops. The Open courses are free courses , whereas marginal fees is charged for advanced training in Pro courses.

Indic AI is registered as a Non-profit under Section-8 of the Indian Companies Act. For funding our operations, we would follow a hybrid approach. Main sources of revenue would be: 

• Commission income from sale of Indic AI Pro courses: Indic AI would charge 10% commission on Pro courses sold through its platform. 

• Sales revenue from Technology and AI solutions: We would be offering our deep learning models and accessibility solutions to educational institutes, course providers, corporates etc. on commercial basis. 

• Grants and Social Funds: These would primarily be used for specific development expenses in the initial years covering accessibility software development including online learning platform (Web Application and Android/iOS App), building datasets for deep learning models, model training and model deployment expenses. Grants would also be used for covering operating expenses and funding gaps in initial two years of operations. 

• CSR funds: These would primarily be used for financing subsidies for paid courses to differently abled students from underprivileged background. We will charge 5% as processing fees.

In FY 2020 (October 2019 to March 2020) the founders have invested seed capital. 

For external funding, we have applied for few grants, but haven't got any confirmation yet. 

We have also applied for incubation in India and US, but are yet to get any confirmations. 

Our estimated expenses for FY21 are USD 237000. 10% of the expenses would be funded from internal cash flows (sale of Pro courses), while 90% would be based on external funds (30% from Corporate Social Responsibility, 20% from Individual donations and 40% from grants and awards).

FY 2021 ( April 2021 to March 2021)

FY21 Revenue in USD    

Revenue from Course Sales: 19,600

Revenue from Tech & ML products: 0 (Revenue is expected on Tech products from FY 2022)

FY21 Expenses in USD 

ML and Tech Team Salary: 1,31,100

Sales,Product & Customer Service Salary: 65,800

Computer Harware: 6,400

Cloud Server and IT costs: 12,600

Coworking Office Rent & Employee Welfare: 19,200

Accounting & Marketing Costs: 1,700

Total Revenue Earned: 19,600

Total Company Expenses: 2,36,800

Funding Required: 2,17,200

Indic AI is an Edtech NGO and need to scale like other Tech startups, so that we can reach millions and solve the problem. For this growth, we have the expertise on how to run an Edtech startup, develop a  strong foundation and make it reach millions of disabled across the world. The exposure in Elevate, will further help us to gain key insights in its ecosystem of Global Heroes and provide an opportunity to network with influencers and industry experts to operationalize our vision.

Winning this award will help us financially and enhance our reputation with training partners, NGOs and corporate across the world. The Elevate Prize will help us in the development, implementation & scaling up of following: 

1. Developing and deployment of our Deep Learning Models to automatically make mainstream content accessible for the disabled. 

2. Invest in our Education Platform: We would invest in our Education Platform to take it from Beta to stable release version, with focus on testing, bug-fixing and incorporate feedback received during pilot test. 

3. Invest in business operations: We need to scale up our operations to reach our target of 60000+ hours of content and 2 million users by 2025. Specifically, we would use funds to hire additional team members for following tasks: a) Alliances team to tie-up with NGOs and training providers b) Machine Learning team to train our Deep Learning models c) Accessibility testing team to do Quality Assurance for the content uploaded on our platform.

In Indic AI, we understand that lot of resources already exist with private institutions, corporates, NGOs and collaborating with them will enable us to make our operations commercially viable. 

Academic Collaborations : with training institutes and NGOs , which can provide structured content which can be made accessible for the disabled.

Technology partners: There are many solutions for virtual education, however none of them are accessible for the disabled. We want to learn from the MIT solver startups which are providing tech solutions for digital education in schools and colleges. 

STEM: subjects are the most important to enhance the creativity and entrepreneurship in disabled students. We are looking for partners which have existing solutions for STEM education.

Distribution Network in other countries: Indic AI team is familiar of scaling business in South Asia, however we need affiliates which can help us to scale our operations in other countries. 

For STEM education : we want to work with Khan academy, MIT scratch , Code.org, Code club, Practical education network solver or similar STEM providers to provide accessible education to the disabled. 

Technology Partners: We want to learn and partner with solver Education modified, Livox, Early bird and leading edtech startups like Duolingo, Edx , Torsh, Blackboard to understand and implement new technologies in the education industry. 

Academic Collaborations: We have partnered with leading institutes in India namely Career Launcher, Vedantu, Career Guide, Superprofs, Adda247, Edupristine, Kredent, Finshiksha etc for competitive exams and professional trainings in accessible format for the disabled. By year 2025, we aim to partner with 1300 institutes to make 60,000 hrs of accessible content. 

Distribution Network: partnering with government organisations and International organisation like ILO, UN, DREDF, International disability alliance .