The day started with an introduction by Andreas Mattsson and Divya Rajagopal, the co-founders of the Sweden-South Asia Media Project. Next session was an insightful opening speech by Nils Eliasson, the Acting Head of the Consulate General of Sweden, where he shared his experiences of human rights and also brought up the fact that Sweden this year celebrates 250 years of press freedom since it is the anniversary of the Swedish Press Freedom Act (Tryckfrihetsförordningen). After the consul’s speech, Andreas Mattson hold a presentation about Media and Innovation in a Digital Context. Before the High Tea Elin Åström, sustainable manager at H&M India Retail, hold an inspirational talk about how to make innovations sustainable. After the break K.P. Jayasankar and Aditi Maddeli from School of Media and Cultural Studies at TISS Mumbai, hold an interesting presentation about the multimedia web archive (Castemopolitan Mumbai) that seeks to contribute to the debates around caste in the metropolitans in India.
The three shortlisted candidates in #Innovationforgood Award, was given 15 minutes each to present their projects. The award carries a cash prize of INR 125,000, and it recognises innovators who have created platforms at the intersection of technology, media and human rights.
Aditi Gupta, co-founder of Menstrupedia, was out first and presented her project that aims to empower parents and teachers with educational tools to teach young girls about periods. For example have Aditi and her team created a comic book about menstruation and a training video for teachers. Paul D’Souza presented his innovation Touché, which is a device with an affordable refreshable braille display. Paul hopes that this device will contribute to making Braille literacy relevant again. Rupesh Mandal and Lokesh Khemani presented their Spothole app, which is a Mobile app for citizens to use to report the GPS location of a pothole. The app is currently in pilot mode in Mumbai and is part of their "Fill in the Potholes Project". The project aims to establish an unified, open and transparent channel for Citizen-Governance partnership to solve civic problems.
After the presentations Saloni Malhotra, jury member and founder of Desicrew, announced that Paul D’Souza with his innovation Touché is the prize winner of #InnovationForGood 2016 and Menstrupedia and Pothole- the app were awarded honorary prizes.