Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

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I happened to attend TedxGateway at NCPA, Nariman Point at Mumbai today. Thanks to Bloomberg for sponsoring my corporate ticket. Overall a fantastic experience with some awesome and inspiring speakers. Here are key take aways:

1. TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate "ideas worth spreading." TED started granting licenses to third parties to organize independent TED-like events internationally. At these TEDx events are prohibited from making profit, although sometimes a fee ($100 max.) can be charged to cover running costs. The licences are free but franchisees are vetted by TED and events are subject to conditions. Speakers are not paid and they must agree to give TED the right to edit and distribute their presentation under a Creative Commons licence.

So, there came about TedxGateway at Mumbai.

Source: Wikipedia

2. Event saw 22 speakers from India and abroad, all with brilliant ideas worth sharing. Most of them being inspiring and top notch speakers. Worth mentioning few:

Mittal Patel:
She runs an NGO called VSSM in Gujarat which works for nomadic communities who are not even registered under census in India and leading unrecognized life. Tradition there is to enter prostitution for girls to earn family income. They can not even own land. Mittal came into act and got few girls married along with getting 20000 official voter id cards for the community.

Cynthia Koenig:
Imagine millions of rural women going several kms to get water for their household. They typically get water by carrying utensil on top of their heads, it is such a painful and time consuming process. Cynthia's organization has decided to made it a history with wello as shown below. She has made the process simple by pulling a wheel in which enough water can be carried. The device is only 750-1000 INR.


Arunachala M.M:
Arunachala is from a poor background in the South of India where he found that women do not have access to hygienic sanitary pads. Recognizing the problem, he created the world's first low-cost machine to produce sanitary towels. This social entrepreneur sells the £1,600 machines directly to rural women through the support of bank loans and not-for-profit organisations. A machine operator can learn the entire towel-making process in three hours and then employ three others to help with processing and distribution.

There were many more speakers but these three touched the hearts and souls of everyone.

3. Overall the event was a huge hit. Though due to inexperienced team it was slightly mis managed, started 45 minutes late, no network coverage, no wifi to tweet, no pads/agenda fliers even for corporate attendees but I am sure they will learn and make 2013 events even better.