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Drshana Rai, 65, seethed with anger as she stood at the tail end of a long queue outside a community centre in Rohtak, a dusty town 75km west of Delhi. "With every new government comes a new scheme. What a waste of time!" fumed Rai, a housewife. Inside the community centre, a large hall with cream-yellow walls and Mediterranean blue windows, four data-entry operators subcontracted by the state-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB), were enrolling account holders for Haryana's new electronic scheme to route social-sector benefits like old-age and widow pensions.Rai has every reason to be sceptical.

The money due to her, part of India's vast, leaky social-security funding network, is presently routed so inefficiently via village heads, sarpanchs, that it threatens to throw national finances, and the UPA government's political agenda of inclusive growth, off track.

Over the next five years, the Centre will spend $250 billion (R11.5 trillion) on subsidies, including old-age pensions, healthcare and the national jobs-for-work programme. Of this, at least 40% ($100 billion) will be siphoned off, mostly by "ghosts" (fake or undeserving recipients), estimates brokerage CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets.

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Mumbai, 30 November, 2010- Geodesic Limited (BSE: 503699, NSE: GEODESIC), a leading provider of content, communication and collaboration solutions to the enterprise and the retail segments today announced its partnership agreement with Credit Information Bangladesh Ltd. (CIBL). This association will enable the two companies to offer technological solutions, products and expertise across varied fields such as banking, insurance, remittances and e-governance. CIBL will offer Geodesic’s Geoamida, an award winning last mile technology platform and other allied products for its customers in Bangladesh.

This association will provide Geodesic an access to service an emerging market having similar need for inclusive growth & e-governance. Through this partnership, GeoAmida, world’s first Linux based integrated mobile computing platform has further strengthened its services to extend its presence in Bangladesh. The mobile computing platform will enable Government, Financial institutions, NGOs and Enterprises to mainstream marginalized people and deliver sophisticated services in the remotest of the places in Bangladesh.

Speaking on this occasion, Mr. Pankaj Kumar, Executive Chairman & Co-founder, Geodesic said....read more

Fullerton India faced several problems with its existing IT system for rural collections including the cost of smart cards, short on-field battery life of the reader, lack of flexibility as well as the unfamiliarity of consumers with the button-based interface. It deployed the GeoAmida platform to tackle these problems. By Prashant L. Rao

Fullerton India’s rural market business consists of providing small to medium sized loans to individuals and group consumers. The business process involves the consumer applying for a loan with Fullerton, which after appraising the credit-worthiness of the potential customer, sanctions the loan amount. Loan amounts are disbursed to the consumer through branches and re-payments are collected at agreed intervals.more

Resource (www.expresscomputeronline.com)

IDBI Bank has already launched the Financial Inclusion drive, ‘Aarthik Vikas Kee Ore’ in unbanked villages of Maharashtra.

As a step towards including the urban poor into the folds of banking, R.M. Malla, Chairman and Managing Director of IDBI Bank Ltd., launched the Urban Financial Inclusion program at Ambedkar Nagar, Cuffe Parade, Mumbai on Saturday July 17, 2010.

Under this program, basic banking services would be provided at the doorsteps of the customers with the help of biometric smart cards and hand-held devices through Business Correspondents of the Bank.

IDBI Bank has already launched the Financial Inclusion drive, ‘Aarthik Vikas Kee Ore’ in unbanked villages of Maharashtra

Resource (www.indiainfoline.com)

"Shagun" is a young woman living in a small village near Yavatmal, India. She makes and sells bread in her village, proudly contributing to her family's income that is often less than $50 a month. One day she was feeling feverish, and wondered if she had malaria. The nearest doctor was two hours away by bus, and she would lose a day's wages and have to pay for transportation to get there. Luckily, her neighbor, "Nalina," had helped her enroll in a health insurance program a few months ago. Nalina was trained by a not-for-profit called CARE Foundation to be a Village Health Champion (VHC) who provides "healthcare at the village doorstep." She has been trained to ask the right questions, and to record basic medical symptoms and vital statistics such as blood pressure, heart rate and temperature, and identify emergency symptoms. For routine diagnoses, Nalina can use a hand-held terminal with a built-in clinical decision support system to provide appropriate medical advice and order prescriptions. In Shagun's case, Nalina liaised with a remote CARE doctor who recommended treatment through an SMS prescription. Over-the-counter drugs were dispensed by Nalina from her medical kit, and within a few days, Shagun was feeling better and back to making bread!

CARE's rural health delivery and microinsurance scheme focuses on the provision of outpatient care in the village setting. Final testing of the technology, training of health workers and product design are being completed. The product will be piloted this fall, with a target outreach of 50 villages that have approximately 100,000 low-income residents by 2012.more

Resource (www.nextbillion.net)

Geodesic’s innovative offering GeoAmida, world’s first Linux based integrated mobile computing platform has beefed up plans to extend its presence in the state of Gujarat. GeoAmida will reach out to all the major public and private sector developmental projects in the state, through reputed IT solution providers.

GeoAmida offers the most reliable and efficient last mile solution to reach the masses, enabling service providers to biometrically identify customers, deliver multiple services remotely and securely, and function efficiently in the remotest parts of the world.

GeoAmida, the mobile computing platform enables Government, Financial institutions, NGOs and Enterprises to mainstream marginalized people and deliver sophisticated services in the remotest of the places.  

GeoAmida has been well accepted by the industry as an integrated handheld computing platform to overcome last mile delivery challenges. Geodesic, in just over a year, has successfully deployed over 15,000 devices across different projects including NREGS, PDS, Financial Inclusion/ Micro-Finance etc. Clients include Source trace, Fullerton India, HCL, Glodyne, Indian State Governments amongst others.

Mr. Pankaj Kumar, Chairman, Geodesic Ltd. stated,"We plan to work with system integrators and other solution providers in Gujarat to serve various public and private sector projects such as Financial Inclusion, Public Distribution System, and Social Welfare project like NREGA, Healthcare, Banking and Financial Services - Financial Inclusion for the rural community, E-Logistics and other e-governance projects."

 As per the recent research reports, the microfinance market in Gujarat alone is estimated at over Rs. 6000 crore. GeoAmida has field proven solutions to reach the unbanked through branchless banking viz.  Microfinance, Pigmy Collections, Business Correspondent banking.

 GeoAmida has recently won the NASSCOM Social Innovation Honor awards 2010 under the category of ICT-led business innovation for development and also been nominated in the PC Quest Best IT implementation award 2010.

A recent success story of GeoAmida was the Fullerton India Credit Co. Ltd. which is a subsidiary company of Fullerton Financial Holdings Pvt. Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of the US $100 Billion – Temasek Holdings, Singapore. Fullerton successfully implemented solutions based on GeoAmida mobile computing platform to carry out its loan collections and reach out to its customers and enhance the on-field team's productivity.

Fullerton had a mobile solution for their collections process, which they found to be lacking in various aspects. The solution was based on contact-based smart cards, which were expensive. Typically, the mobile battery did not last for more than a couple of hours with all the additional power required for running the application. Because of the short on-field battery life, the device could not be used for the entire work day leading to manual recording of transactions or carrying forward of transactions to the next day. This resulted in duplicity of work and reduced productivity for the field-team which in turn resulted in loss of revenue for the company. There was a need for standardized operating procedures for the field force team to ensure that all transactions were conducted only using the handheld device with proper validations and authentication. Fullerton accomplished this with an integrated mobile solution based on GeoAmida mobile computing platform from Geodesic Limited. The solution composed of hardware and software components. The hardware comprised of GeoAmida devices and on the other hand a customized loan collections software was developed and pre-installed on each device. This new system was able enhance productivity of field force by at least 30%, through reduction in manual errors, remove duplication of work plus regular collection updates from the field has empowered decision makers of company to take pro-active business decisions.

Project Specs

• Project Head: Samir Khare, Sr.Vice President (Technology Applications)
• Deployment Location: Mumbai
Team Size: 15
• Tech Used: Linux OS C Programming SQLite Database
• Expected life: NA
• Implementation Partner

Geodesic

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