Press Releases

President Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil launches Sasken’s VyapaarSEWA™ as part of DoT-USOF Sanchar Shakti

The first phase of this initiative expected to benefit over 3000 women across Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Bangalore, March 9, 2011: Smt. Pratibha Devisingh Patil, Hon’ble President of India, on Monday launched the ‘Sanchar Shakti' pilot project scheme of the Department of Telecommunications – Universal Service Obligation Fund (DoT-USOF), a suite of mobile Value Added Services (mVAS) to provide a variety of useful information to women's self-help groups about government schemes and health and social issues, besides inputs related to and training in livelihood.

The presentation of a beautifully woven shawl to Her Excellency by a member of “Umang” a Haryana based Self Help Group (SHG) incubated by Society for Promotion of Youth and Masses (SPYM), which was hand-made by a member of “Ganga Sangam” SHG, incubated by Evangelical Social Action forum (ESAF) from the southern state of Kerala, culminated the year long efforts of Sasken Communication Technologies Ltd. (Sasken), DoT-USOF, partner NGOs in the creation of a mobile Information Communication Technology (ICT) based value added service.

Speaking on the occasion, the President mentioned that these initiatives will benefit and improve the skills and livelihood of the rural women, besides enabling the rural populace to join the cyber community and, in this way, bridge the digital divide.

Sasken’s VyapaarSEWA™ is one of the four categories of projects aimed at rural women SHGs under the Sanchar Shakti scheme. The objective of VyapaarSEWA™ is to create strong market linkages for rural SHG women through mVAS applications and contribute to their socio-economic development.

 “Innovation is at the core of our business and is what drives our offerings to all our customers worldwide. On any given day, our engineers are seen creating path-breaking applications for use in varied domains”, said Dr. G. Venkatesh, Chief Technology Officer, Sasken.  “Happy and proud that we at Sasken are able to contribute to the development of society as a whole through what we are most passionate about – technology”, he added.

Project VyapaarSEWA™ will enable rural women SHGs to connect to the market in non-immediate neighbourhoods to enhance their livelihood activities through an IT based voice and non-voice mVAS accessible through ubiquitous mobile phones. This mVAS system will provide a link between SHG members and buyers of their products and provide relevant dynamic information such as order status, inventory levels and account receivables to the

SHG members. The project will work with SHGs who are engaged in various livelihood activities based on products such as honey, pickle, savories and condiments etc., in the food category; and jute / banana fibre / talipot fibre bags, baskets and gift items in the handicraft categories.

More about VyapaarSEWA™: VyapaarSEWA™ is an initiative driven by Sasken and supported by Operators along with several facilitating NGOs from Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

Objective: Creation of strong market linkages for rural SHG women through mVAS applications and contribution to their socio-economic development.

Background: As rural neighbourhoods have low purchasing power, the SHGs lack suitable markets for their goods. On the other hand, such markets can be found in semi urban and urban areas. Hence, it becomes vital to establish market linkages between rural SHG products and urban consumers. The rural SHGs are involved in income generation activities that include production of locally viable goods and services. Examples are extraction of pure honey, preparation of hand decorated greeting cards, dancing dolls out of paper mache and so on.

With the combination of push and pull based services through increased mobile connectivity, Sasken is exploring the linkage of southern rural SHGs in Tamil Nadu and Kerala with the northern urban population in the national capital region (Delhi) by creating linkages between them.  

Expected outcomes:

• Improvement of economic condition of SHG women
• Creation of an mVAS platform which can be used to provide other Community Based Services
• Establishment of strong marketing linkages
• Facilities that connect rural women SHGs to markets in non-immediate neighbourhoods
• Support to all activities in the order to cash cycle using a mobile phone

 About Sasken

Sasken Communication Technologies Limited (BSE: 532663 & NSE: SASKEN) is an embedded communications solutions company that helps businesses across the communication value chain accelerate product development life cycles.

Sasken offers a unique combination of research and development consultancy, wireless software products, software services and network engineering services, and works with Network OEMs, Semiconductor Vendors, Terminal Device OEMs and Operators across the world. Global Fortune 500 and Tier 1 companies in these segments are part of Sasken's customer profile.

Established in 1989, Sasken employs over 3,500 people at its offices in India, China, Finland, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Korea, UK and USA.

For further information please visit www.sasken.com

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Certain statements in this release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements due to risks or uncertainties associated with our expectations with respect to, but not limited to, our ability to successfully implement our strategy and our growth and expansion plans, technological changes, our exposure to market risks, general economic and political conditions in India which have an impact on our business activities or investments, changes in the laws and regulations that apply to the Indian IT services industry, including with respect to tax incentives and export benefits, adverse changes in foreign laws, including those relating to outsourcing and immigration, increasing competition in and the conditions of the Indian and global IT services industry, the prices we are able to obtain for our services, wage levels in India for IT professionals, the loss of significant customers the monetary and interest policies of India, inflation, deflation, unanticipated turbulence in interest rates, foreign exchange rates, equity prices or other rates or prices, the performance of the financial markets in India and globally, changes in domestic and foreign laws, regulations and taxes and changes in competition in the information technology/telecommunication industries. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our Red herring filing. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the Company.