Aaditeshwar Seth

Devesh Pant, Dibyendu Talukder, Deepak Kumar et al.

Initiation, monitoring, and evaluation of development programmes can involve field-based data collection about project activities. This data collection through digital devices may not always be feasible though, for reasons such as unaffordability of smartphones and tablets by field-based cadre, or shortfalls in their training and capacity building. Paper-based data collection has been argued to be more appropriate in several contexts, with automated digitization of the paper forms through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and OMR (Optical Mark Recognition) techniques. We contribute with providing a large dataset of handwritten digits, and deep learning based models and methods built using this data, that are effective in real-world environments. We demonstrate the deployment of these tools in the context of a maternal and child health and nutrition awareness project, which uses IVR (Interactive Voice Response) systems to provide awareness information to rural women SHG (Self Help Group) members in north India. Paper forms were used to collect phone numbers of the SHG members at scale, which were digitized using the OCR tools developed by us, and used to push almost 4 million phone calls. The data, model, and code have been released in the open-source domain.

Salam Michael Singh, Shubhmoy Kumar Garg, Amitesh Misra et al.

Sexual education aims to foster a healthy lifestyle in terms of emotional, mental and social well-being. In countries like India, where adolescents form the largest demographic group, they face significant vulnerabilities concerning sexual health. Unfortunately, sexual education is often stigmatized, creating barriers to providing essential counseling and information to this at-risk population. Consequently, issues such as early pregnancy, unsafe abortions, sexually transmitted infections, and sexual violence become prevalent. Our current proposal aims to provide a safe and trustworthy platform for sexual education to the vulnerable rural Indian population, thereby fostering the healthy and overall growth of the nation. In this regard, we strive towards designing SUKHSANDESH, a multi-staged AI-based Question Answering platform for sexual education tailored to rural India, adhering to safety guardrails and regional language support. By utilizing information retrieval techniques and large language models, SUKHSANDESH will deliver effective responses to user queries. We also propose to anonymise the dataset to mitigate safety measures and set AI guardrails against any harmful or unwanted response generation. Moreover, an innovative feature of our proposal involves integrating ``avatar therapy'' with SUKHSANDESH. This feature will convert AI-generated responses into real-time audio delivered by an animated avatar speaking regional Indian languages. This approach aims to foster empathy and connection, which is particularly beneficial for individuals with limited literacy skills. Partnering with Gram Vaani, an industry leader, we will deploy SUKHSANDESH to address sexual education needs in rural India.

Aman Khullar, Paramita Panjal, Rachit Pandey et al.

Voice-based discussion forums where users can record audio messages which are then published for other users to listen and comment, are often moderated to ensure that the published audios are of good quality, relevant, and adhere to editorial guidelines of the forum. There is room for the introduction of AI-based tools in the moderation process, such as to identify and filter out blank or noisy audios, use speech recognition to transcribe the voice messages in text, and use natural language processing techniques to extract relevant metadata from the audio transcripts. We design such tools and deploy them within a social enterprise working in India that runs several voice-based discussion forums. We present our findings in terms of the time and cost-savings made through the introduction of these tools, and describe the feedback of the moderators towards the acceptability of AI-based automation in their workflow. Our work forms a case-study in the use of AI for automation of several routine tasks, and can be especially relevant for other researchers and practitioners involved with the use of voice-based technologies in developing regions of the world.

Mehak Gupta, Shayan Saifi, Konark Verma et al.

Understanding what factors bring about socio-economic development may often suffer from the streetlight effect, of analyzing the effect of only those variables that have been measured and are therefore available for analysis. How do we check whether all worthwhile variables have been instrumented and considered when building an econometric development model? We attempt to address this question by building unsupervised learning methods to identify and rank news articles about diverse events occurring in different districts of India, that can provide insights about what may have transpired in the districts. This can help determine whether variables related to these events are indeed available or not to model the development of these districts. We also describe several other applications that emerge from this approach, such as to use news articles to understand why pairs of districts that may have had similar socio-economic indicators approximately ten years back ended up at different levels of development currently, and another application that generates a newsfeed of unusual news articles that do not conform to news articles about typical districts with a similar socio-economic profile. These applications outline the need for qualitative data to augment models based on quantitative data, and are meant to open up research on new ways to mine information from unstructured qualitative data to understand development.

Aparna Moitra, Archna Kumar, Aaditeshwar Seth

Our research presents the case-study of a mobile phone based, voice-driven platform - Mobile Vaani, established with a goal to empower poor and marginalized communities to create their own local media. In this paper, we derive a comprehensive theory of change for Mobile Vaani from data gathered using the Most Significant Change technique. This paper contributes towards formulating a theory of change for technology-driven community media platforms which can be adapted to other ICTD interventions too.

Muskaan, Mehak Preet Dhaliwal, Aaditeshwar Seth

Online participatory media platforms that enable one-to-many communication among users, see a significant amount of user generated content and consequently face a problem of being able to recommend a subset of this content to its users. We address the problem of recommending and ranking this content such that different viewpoints about a topic get exposure in a fair and diverse manner. We build our model in the context of a voice-based participatory media platform running in rural central India, for low-income and less-literate communities, that plays audio messages in a ranked list to users over a phone call and allows them to contribute their own messages. In this paper, we describe our model and evaluate it using call-logs from the platform, to compare the fairness and diversity performance of our model with the manual editorial processes currently being followed. Our models are generic and can be adapted and applied to other participatory media platforms as well.

Aaditeshwar Seth

With a view towards understanding why undesirable outcomes often arise in ICT projects, we draw attention to three aspects in this essay. First, we present several examples to show that incorporating an ethical framework in the design of an ICT system is not sufficient in itself, and that ethics need to guide the deployment and ongoing management of the projects as well. We present a framework that brings together the objectives, design, and deployment management of ICT projects as being shaped by a common underlying ethical system. Second, we argue that power-based equality should be incorporated as a key underlying ethical value in ICT projects, to ensure that the project does not reinforce inequalities in power relationships between the actors directly or indirectly associated with the project. We present a method to model ICT projects to make legible its influence on the power relationships between various actors in the ecosystem. Third, we discuss that the ethical values underlying any ICT project ultimately need to be upheld by the project teams, where certain factors like political ideologies or dispersed teams may affect the rigour with which these ethical values are followed. These three aspects of having an ethical underpinning to the design and management of ICT projects, the need for having a power-based equality principle for ICT projects, and the importance of socialization of the project teams, needs increasing attention in today's age of ICT platforms where millions and billions of users interact on the same platform but which are managed by only a few people.

Aaditeshwar Seth

We recount in this essay the decade-long story of Gram Vaani, a social enterprise with a vision to build appropriate ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) for participatory media in rural and low-income settings, to bring about social development and community empowerment. Other social enterprises will relate to the learning gained and the strategic pivots that Gram Vaani had to undertake to survive and deliver on its mission, while searching for a robust financial sustainability model. While we believe the ideal model still remains elusive, we conclude this essay with an open question about the reason to differentiate between different kinds of enterprises - commercial or social, for-profit or not-for-profit - and argue that all enterprises should have an ethical underpinning to their work.

Aaditeshwar Seth

We attempt to make two arguments in this essay. First, through a case study of a mobile phone based voice-media service we have been running in rural central India for more than six years, we describe several implementation complexities we had to navigate towards realizing our intended vision of bringing social development through technology. Most of these complexities arose in the interface of our technology with society, and we argue that even other technology providers can create similar processes to manage this socio-technological interface and ensure intended outcomes from their technology use. We then build our second argument about how to ensure that the organizations behind both market driven technologies and those technologies that are adopted by the state, pay due attention towards responsibly managing the socio-technological interface of their innovations. We advocate for the technology engineers and researchers who work within these organizations, to take up the responsibility and ensure that their labour leads to making the world a better place especially for the poor and marginalized. We outline possible governance structures that can give more voice to the technology developers to push their organizations towards ensuring that responsible outcomes emerge from their technology. We note that the examples we use to build our arguments are limited to contemporary information and communication technology (ICT) platforms used directly by end-users to share content with one another, and hence our argument may not generalize to other ICTs in a straightforward manner.