AMMACHI Labs and CWEGE (Center for Women's Empowerment & Gender Equality)

2018

AMMACHI Labs & The Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality

We research, design & implement technologies & solutions for inclusive empowerment.

AMRITA vishwa vidyapeetham

Through the example of her own life, Mata Amritanandamayi Devi (Amma) has inspired people from all over the world to walk in the path of selfless-service & compassion

Mata Amritanandamayi Devi Known the World over as Amma

Chancellor of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters (University at Buffalo, USA)

vision with purpose

It is Amma’s vision that motivates us to create innovative educational tools and skill development solutions to uplift entire communities to work towards poverty alleviation and the empowerment of downtrodden people in India and beyond. Amma inspires and guides our team to design, create and research technologies that approach societal challenges in a revolutionary and compassionate way. For the past 40 years Amma has been traveling to six continents and individually comforting over 30 million people, delivering inspiring speeches at global forums. She has established programs for gender equality and women’s empowerment to motivate and support women to discover their inner strength and discover their potential.

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Amma comforting victims of the South Asian Tsunami, 2005

global voice for women

Amma is a strong role model and mentor for women. Her teachings help to realize that gender equality and women’s empowerment are indeed possible. Her life story serves as a shining example for women to overcome the many societal challenges they face, and to rise up to achieve their full potential. This compassion is the driving force behind all of our efforts at AMMACHI Labs.

Amma distributes financial aid to recipients of MA Math’s Amrita Nidhi pension program

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

our inspiration Amma’s Global Accomplishments for Women’s Empowerment

Over 1 Million Pensions for Widows Microfinance Self Help Groups for 100,000 Women Educating Women to Make Their Villages Self–Reliant Skill Development for Over 60,000 Women in Self-Help Groups Women Building Toilets for an Open Defecation Free (ODF) India Ordaining Women as Priests with Equal Positions Skill Training for Women in Traditional Arts

Amma circa 1987 participating in construction work along side MA Math volunteers

Contents 6 who we are

8 Our Approach

12 motor skill training 14 Haptics 18 Virtual Reality

20 21st century skills

22 2nd Foundation 24 Social & Emotional Learning

30 learning technologies

32 E-Content for Skill Development 35 Game-Based Learning

40 humanitarian technologies 42 Augmenting Agriculture 46 Augmenting Construction

48 women’s Empowerment 50 52 58 60 62

Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality Our Field Work Approach UNESCO Chair & Mapping Vulnerabilities AI for Social Good Mapping Vulnerabilities Along the SDGs

68 Collaborations 69 Publications

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AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality

Projects 39 A Joint Scoping Study Between South Africa & India 54 WE:CSDP–Community Sanitation 64 WE: Sanitation

Case Studies 26 Skills in Schools 28 Ideal Village Activity 29 Cultivating the Maker Mindset 37 Abhi Ya Kabhi in Himachal Pradesh 38 Learning Spaces in Remote Places 45 Live-In-Labs 56 Right to Information 66 Changemakers Stories

Events 47 raha 2016 Conference at Amrita 61 NRSC & ISRO Workshop on Bhuvan 63 CSW61 at the United Nations

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who we are

A Diverse Team

We Research, Design & Implement Technologies for Inclusive Empowerment Through Education & Skill Development 6

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

1 Our Commitment We, at ammachi Labs and the Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality are an eclectic group of kindred spirits. In our minds, we ask questions, challenge the established, and seek to understand the subtle, disciplined by research. In our hearts, we are inspired by Amma, our chancellor. We address human sorrow and hardship with empathy, let our research and experience guide our judgment, and compassion guide our decisions. We put our minds to work for causes that are guided by our hearts. Although our group is diverse in disciplines and research methods, we stand unified in our philosophies, and in our commitment to society through a Problem Driven Iterative Approach. We conduct research, and design and implement technologies, for the purpose of solving social problems leading to inclusive development of under-served communities.

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who we are

Our Approach

Engineers, social scientists, field workers, volunteers and exchange students from around the globe all working alongside rural villagers to understand India’s complex social problems, and build solutions.

how we work Boots on the Ground

Our engineers, social scientists, field workers, volunteers and exchange students from around the globe all work alongside rural villagers to understand India’s complex social problems.

Everyone that works in AMMACHI Labs and the Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality (CWEGE) spend at least one month in the field every year.

Our Mission

To develop comprehensive, learning tools such as e-content for training, simulators for skill development, augmentation devices for skill enhancement , in an effort to develop a scalable and cost effective implementation solution to significantly impact the livelihood of impoverished communities.

Our Vision

To strengthen the economic fiber and contribute to social stability of the nation by

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empowering India’s masses in a sustainable, cost-effective and scalable way by providing innovative technological solutions and resources for physical, vocational and social skill development.

Social & Technological Solutions

AMMACHI Labs and the Center for Gender

Equality and Women’s Empowerment (CWEGE) work cohesively to ideate and create social and technological solutions. The CWEGE works to understand the needs of communities in terms of skill development and community vulnerability, with a focus on women’s empowerment. ammachi Labs is the innovative arm that develops technologies in response to the needs identified. With 61% women employees, we foster a gender-inclusive workplace culture; from upper management, to women in tech and engineering, to women in law and advocacy Engineers from AMMACHI Labs working along side members of Ratanpur Village in Bihar in September 2017.

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

We live in a world of changing environments and the one critical way in which to survive in a changing environment is to make sure you have the skills to survive. We need to update our skills or acquire new skills continuously. Our work has focused on women’s empowerment. They make up half of the world’s population, and when you empower women you empower the household.”

human centered design

Human-centered design is a framework to solve problems by involving the people whose problem it is to solve in every step of the process, to design and implementation.

Action Research & The Participatory Design Approach

Social problems, even the seemingly overwhelming ones like gender inequality, poverty, educational gaps and sanitation, are solvable through human-centered design.

The people who face those problems every day are the ones who hold the key to their answer. Our team spends a significant amount of time with the communities we

bhavani Rao R

Director, AMMACHI Labs UNESCO Chair in Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham

want to benefit the most in order to deeply understand their issues and appreciate otherwise not properly considered nuances.

Action research methodology enables us to pose questions, gather data, ideate and implement a course of action. This grounded process allows us to create innovative new solutions rooted in people’s actual needs and the solutions are designed with the affected communities, for them.

The AMMACHI Labs and CWEGE Team in front of our office headquarters, Amritapuri Campus.

who we are

Prof. Bhavani showing the CVET Rural Toilet Building Course to women in Jharkhand.

Villages are the Soul of India

The MA Math has adopted villages throughout India with the vision to make them self-reliant. With the goal of empowering rural communities, AMMACHI Labs has designed hi-tech and lo-tech social interventions in the areas of sustainability, water, sanitation and education. We are also working to support the Government of India’s initiative for Open Defecation Free (ODF) Villages and the Swachh Bharat Campaign. We don’t just go in and build toilets, we train the women of the community on toilet building using available materials, build with them, and hold sessions with the entire family on the necessity of proper sanitation for health and hygiene.

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Rural Toilet Building Course in Jharkhand.

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

64 Village Partnerships Pandori Padiyal

JAMMU & KASHMIR

Bhanwal Maira

Hadiyabad Tenduni Morasia Ichari (Musahar) Ratanpur

Indhpur (Ward 6,7,8) Dunda Udalakka Khattukhal

himachal pradesh

Kanti

PUNJAB

UTTARAKHAND

Haryana

Harirampura Shyamoli

arunachal pradesh

RAJAsthan Nani Borvai Moti Borvai Dongri Nani Vav Moti Vav

Nagla Purabiya Hemraj Sarai Nooruddin Dr. Khera

sikkim

Uttar pradesh bihar madhya pradesh

Juna Katthiwada Golamba Muljipura Haveli kheda

gujarat

meghalaya

jharkhand

manipur

Majebdaari Krishnarampuram Ramnagar Kalinagar

chhatisgarh ODisHa

Devgain Karkata Butiyo Bandhuya Bundubeda

telangana

andhra pradesh

goa

nagaland

west bengal

maharashtra Ransai Sargachiwadi Margachiwadi Banglachiwadi

assam

Kodur

karnataka Vada Malcopon

Deurbal Taraibeda Karanji Malgaon

Bindhyagiri Mundasai Guptapada Haridamada

Gudipadicharivu Byse D Rampur Rampur Atkoor

Komalikudi Valaram kunnu

tamil nadu kerala Sadivayil Pudupathi Chinnampathi Aiyampathi Muruganpathy

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motor skill training

DO AND LEARN.

We Use Technology to Develop Engaging & Innovative Tools to Train, Enhance & Augment Skills 12

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

2 Immersive Learning Human motor skill training forms a large portion of the curriculum for any training involving fine motor skills. Whether it is routine carpentry or complex brain surgery, skill intensive vocations and professions demand long hours of training in order to gain the expertise and workmanship needed to perform complex tasks skillfully. Exercising the motor control processes is a necessary component of training. While there is money and effort put around the world in developing advanced skills simulators for pilot training and surgery, we are one of the pioneers in the world for developing cost-effective simulators targeting the vocational trades. Understanding this area and leveraging technologies to enhance motor skill development is at the heart of work at AMMACHI Labs. We use technologies like haptics to train in manual skills, virtual reality for immersive learning, machine learning to measure human performance and create intelligent software tutors. We have deployed our skill training simulators across India in collaboration with partners like Larsen & Toubro and the Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation.

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motor skill training

Haptics

AMMACHI Labs has made pioneering contributions in the area of haptic systems for motor skill training and skill assessment in India.

Our haptics team designs and manufac-

tures simulators that offer compelling and safe training that uses the realistic sense of touch. We also provide guidance for the use of robotics in vocational education and training, physical rehabilitation, and medical simulation. Specific research areas include haptic rendering, design of haptic devices, haptic guidance and shared control schemes for haptic simulations.

simulators for vocational training

Our engineers, subject matter experts and artists ensure that the virtual learning environments presented in our simulators capture the essence of physical workspaces where the master patiently trains the apprentice to expertise.

The aptah Training Simulator

We designed the Amrita Progressive Training Assistance using Haptic simulation (APTAH), a cost effective four degrees of freedom (4 DoF) haptic simulator that can train the use

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of over nineteen hand-held and powered tools used in several vocations. The simulator provides audio, visual and haptic cues that can help the novice master the use of the tools in the absence of a human trainer. We model tool-material interactions rendered using a custom visuohaptic environment built on top of the CHAI3D library. This is an unconventional attempt at designing a multi-tool haptic trainer that could potentially replace traditional training tools and materials in the primary stages of vocational skill training.

APTAH currently simulates complex machinery like the table saw, band saw and the jigsaw and tools like the hacksaw, file and the hand plane. The simulator has been used to train the first certified women plumbers of India as well as in schools in Andhra Pradesh to train students in practical maker skills. Larsen & Toubro is currently using the APTAH simulator at their Construction Skills Training Institutes along with our in-house Skills Learning Management System.

The APTAH linear haptic device in action, training plumbing students on how to use a hacksaw.

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

Rebar Bending

All building constructions in India use construction rebars (steel concrete reinforcing bars) to provide structural reinforcement for concrete work. This necessitates experts in bending and cutting rebar to correctly size and bend the long steel rods before they can be installed. We developed a novel haptic based bar bending simulator with inputs from Larsen & Toubro’s (L&T) Construction Skills Training Institute (CSTI) for training novices in the construction rebar bending skill. The haptic training device is combined with a virtual environment and is capable of providing manual skill training and evaluation of prior knowledge of the trainees. The system provides a multi modal simulation environment with visual, audio and haptic feedback.

Copies of the simulator are currently being used in the simulation centers of L&T’s CSTIs in Chennai and Delhi.

SMD Soldering

With the manufacturing of electronic products getting and fresh impetus under the Government’s Make in India initiative, the demand for complex soldering skills has

Training on the Rebar Bending haptic simulator developed

by AMMACHI Labs.

gone up. Surface mount hand soldering is a complex bimanual task that uses a tweezer tool and a soldering iron for soldering a surface mount component on a printed circuit board. As this requires a lot of practice to master, our engineers developed a custom 5 DoF haptic simulator with a sensorized tweezer end effector which couples with a virtual simulation environment where the students learn how to solder different virtual SMDs onto a virtual circuit board.

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motor skill training

surgical simulation

With this application, the students learn how to solder different virtual SMDs onto a virtual circuit board.

DIY Skill Training Devices

Guided by Prof. Ken Salisbury of Stanford University, who is a pioneer in the field of haptic simulators, our researchers at ammachi Labs have created low cost, easily assembled DIY skills training simulators using everyday materials and inexpensive electronics components. These virtual tools are created using open source software and hardware, the designs for which are freely downloadable. This toolkit uses passive haptics to recreate the feel of using the jigsaw & bandsaw machines for cutting wood. The toolkit would serve to generate interest in vocational education and provide greater accessibility for base level skill training.

Dr. Ken Salisbury of Stanford University demonstrates how low cost, off the shelf materials can be used to build effective training devices during a workshop in AMMACHI Labs.

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Being part of the Amrita family, AMMACHI Labs has access to the medical expertise of the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences hospital, one of the leading hospitals in India and a pioneer in advanced medical procedures provided to people at little cost. We are currently working with surgeons at Amrita Hospital to develop cost-effective simulators for training students of surgery. We develop novel algorithms and mathematical models to simulate tool-tissue interactions, especially in the context of multi-point haptics rendering.

Virtual Soldering with Haptics.

Lumbar spinal needle puncture is a blind process commonly used by surgeons needing fine motor skills to identify the lumbar position via hand palpation, control the depth and angle of needle insertion using visual and haptic feedback. It is a blind process, in which physicians get the idea of needle insertion depth mainly through haptic feedback.

In collaboration with surgeons from Amrita Hospital, our engineers developed a bimanual haptic simulator for training human hand palpation and needle insertion motor skills.

For accurate haptic feedback of the forces involved in the process, we modeled a lateral haptic model for rendering human hand palpation and a layered haptic model for modeling lumbar needle puncture.

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

evidence of mastery CASE STUDY

Motor Skill Analytics

building with insight

In 2009, the first batch of female plumbers trained in part on haptic simulators successfully graduated from AMMACHI Labs.

A simulator may recreate reality as accurately as possible, but still fail if it fails to provide feedback and if it is blind to the learning progress of the student. At AMMACHI Labs, we have Machine Learning researchers analyze learner activity streams for evidences of learning and mastery based on simulator sensor data and assessments. We are developing a Learning Management System focusing on Motor Skills which quantifies the learner progress and compares it with skilled experts.

Across our skills training simulators we work on user performance analysis, discovering performance trends among novice, intermediate and expert skilled groups. We also discover patterns at the individual’s level using customized user performance models. These

insights are being used to build intelligent tutoring capabilities into our simulators to provide customized feedback to the individual learner on his/her performance.

Today, the women are active members in the workforce and have set a new standard for the vocation of plumbing.

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motor skill training

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality (VR) technologies promise to immerse us in accurate recreations of the real world with advances in motion tracking, head mounted displays and graphics hardware.

At ammachi labs, we explore the poten-

tial of virtual reality in vocational education and rehabilitation building on technologies like the Leap Motion, HTC Vive, Microsoft Kinect & zSpace among others.

vr for vocational education Virtual Motorcycle Assembly Trainer

We created training software as a companion tool for our motorcycle maintenance CVET course, helping students visualize the layout of motorcycle parts, allowing for interactive labeling and virtual assembly

operations with gestures using the Leap Motion hand tracking sensor & the zSpace virtual holographic display.

Scaffolding Simulator

Scaffoldings are temporary platforms to help construction crews build structures. Building scaffoldings require good spatial thinking skills as well as the ability to work without worrying about the height of the scaffolding being built. The completely immersive experience offered by the HTC Vive provides us with the perfect tool to simulate scenarios for scaffolding construction. We are currently

The Virtual Motorcycle Assembly Trainer.

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AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

Student performing a VR motorcycle disassembly task using the HTC Vive.

developing this simulator with inputs from subject matter experts of the L&T Construction Skills Training Institute.

vr for rehabilitation AMBA Balance Trainer

There is an emerging need for balance rehabilitation due to its growing population of elderly, diabetics and stroke patients. We designed a cost effective system in collaboration with the Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation Department of Amrita Hospital christened AMBA (Amrita Balance Trainer), the system provides static and dynamic balance training through interactive virtual reality games. The intention is to positively influence the activities of daily living (ADL) of patients suffering from balance disorders.

Demo of balance rehabilitation with the AMBA Balance Trainer.

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21st century skills

future proof

Vital Skills Such as Complex Problem Solving & Collaboration with Peers to Succeed are a Must for Future Job Seekers 20

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

3 Tomorrow’s Problems In a rapidly changing work environment where jobs are being taken over by robots and algorithms, equipping the workforce with 21st century skills is essential. The skills needed to make the Indian workforce future-proof and ready for the 21st century knowledge economy range from the social to the intellectual, from coming up with creative solutions using robotics, software engineering and product development, to working and collaborating on solving complex problems as teams. India needs a new generation of thinkers and tinkerers, who can solve problems of tomorrow with sensitivity and imagination.

To this end, Ammachi Labs and the CWEGE have initiated the 2nd Foundation series of 21st century skills workshops targeting school children and young adults, particularly from villages and vulnerable sections of society. We count the Andhra Pradesh government, Amrita SeRVe (Self Reliant Villages) and the Amrita Vidyalayam school network among our partners to help us integrate these unique approaches into school curricula.

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21st century skills

2nd Foundation

AMMACHI Labs has created the 2nd Foundation, a new education initiative for teaching 21st century skills to school children and young adults in rural India.

If the first foundation of education is

provided by the school and community in the basic literacies and values, the 2nd Foundation fortifies these with 21st century skills. We put equal emphasis on teaching essential life & social problem solving skills alongside advanced technical skills like programming, robotics & hardware prototyping.

This unique mix ensures that the youth build up resilience to face all eventualities that an unpredictable future brings.

maker skills

Creativity, invention, and innovation are values championed as central pillars of education. However, school environments that foster open ended design-build projects are

uncommon in India. In our maker skill course, students learn hand-on skills in the use of tools allowing them to participate in actual fabrication activities typically afforded only to trained professionals. The desire to make design and prototyping more integral to the school education experience is what inspires the Maker Workshop. The Maker Workshops encourage students to respond dynamically to what they discover, to learn from their mistakes as well as accomplishments, and master new skills in an environment that emphasizes process and product over content. The maker curriculum covers design thinking principles, 3D modeling, sketching, basics of embedded controller programming using Arduino. The workshop

The children surpassed their initial inhibitions in handling tools, to the point that they would then teach their peers how to handle them. Maker Workshops, Feb 2018.

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AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

Students test out the bottle boat that they made during the 2nd Foundation Maker Workshop in Thallasserry, Kerala, India in February 2018.

culminates in hands-on projects where the students create ‘Space observatories’ with projected 3D constellations, go on ‘Ocean Expeditions’ on bottle boats with underwater scopes, launch water rockets, construct floating bicycles, hydraulic robot arms, puppet theaters & design automated cities and villages.

world programming practices. The students are put on a pathway to move from visual programming into textual programming using the Python language. The course is aligned with ACM-CSTA’s Computer Science standards along with the NSTA’s Next Generation Science Standards.

computational thinking

The Robotics Workshop is designed to provide an introduction to physical computing and interactive art. Using laptops, tablets and a custom designed robotics kit, participants will complete a variety of tasks by making, tinkering, engineering, assembling & programming. The team-based workshop allows participants to work in groups to grasp the relationship between software and hardware and showcase their creative abilities by creating interactive robotic art structures. The curriculum is tailored towards girls to encourage them into going into STEM careers by putting emphasis on art, crafts and storytelling aspects of robot construction.

The Computational Thinking course serves as an introduction to computational concepts & practices using MIT Scratch and the Haathi Mera Saathi computational thinking game built by engineers at Ammachi Labs, the latter existing as an immersive virtual environment, combining the power of visual block-based scripting with the appeal and versatility of modern multi-player games. The course software allows for multiple learning pathways allowing students to explore storytelling, game development, art and architecture, allowing them to remix and critique each other’s public “code artifacts” mimicking real

robotics

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21st century skills

Social & Emotional Learning

Alongside the technical courses, workshops are conducted on Personal Capacity Building and Social Problem Solving. The technical courses and life skills courses are woven together to create a unified platform for deeper and more integrated learning.

personal capacity building

In order to encourage the next generation into becoming responsible citizens, it is important that they attain self-efficacy and self-esteem, being sensitive to their own emotional and physical needs. We engage the students in topics ranging from health, sanitation, hygiene to self confidence, team building, creative self-expression and peer to peer learning. Our approach to SEL is through an activity based learning strategy where the students script and act in theater performances, create documentaries and take part in debates & discussions with their peers. The SEL workshop sets the foundation for the Social Problem Solving skills as only a confident and self-aware person can begin to transform their community.

Students demonstrating their maker skills combined with social problem solving skills to illustrate a solution related to issues affecting their community.

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AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

social problem solving

Researchers from the CWEGE, in collaboration with engineers from ammachi Labs, designed Social Problem Solving workshops with the aim of training students in personal capacity development and community building skills. One main focus area within Life Skills is the concept of vulnerability. Students are introduced to vulnerabilities in the community and techniques for mapping them.

Social Problem Solving workshops take place in safe learning environments where students learn to develop strategies for solving a wide range of social problems from child marriage to contaminated water supply. At the end of the workshop, the students also design and implement an intervention to address at least one issue in their own community.

Students in Amrita Vidyalayam School design automated solutions to simplify tasks in their school.

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case study Skills in Schools

train the trainers programs & 21st century skills workshops in schools

Train the Trainer program on developing mentorship skills.

The ASPIRE TTT Program 2016 (Andhra Pradesh Schools Program Innovation For Research & Excellence) is a train-the-trainer program that is part of the collaboration between Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and the Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC). AMMACHI Labs team members from the 2nd Foundation, conducted a specially designed program for the 24 mentors from Andhra Pradesh State Skill Development Corporation (APSSDC).

They underwent a 3 week long immersive Train The Trainer (TTT) program on vulnerability mapping with mentorship skills to prepare them for future workshops in rural schools in Andhra Pradesh. Participants engaged in group discussions on various social and environmental issues and gained vital skills and techniques to adapt to the changes and learned to design their own 26

solutions to help tackle these issues. As a final project, the mentors along with AMMACHI Labs team members, conducted workshops at the Amritavidyalayam School in Haripad for 110 students.

TTT program activities.

Designing Solutions

Students doing hands-on learning as part of a pilot program to bring skill training into mainstream education.

Amrita Vidyalayam Schools are the first in the nation to bring computerized vocational and life skills training to 190 girls and boys grades 7, 8, and 9 with trades that include Two-Wheeler Maintenance, Artificial Jewelry Making, Fabric Painting, Life Skills and Values-Based Education. The pilot program aims to reach 27 Amrita Vidyalayam Schools across India in the near future. The courses are delivered through the online vocational training portal MySangham which was developed by AMMACHI Labs and A-VIEW.

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critical thinking

CASE STUDY Ideal Village Activity

personal capacity development and community building skills The Ideal Village exercise is one of our

most important exercises in the Life Enrichment Education (LEE) curriculum. This exercise is designed to encourage community engagement and boost self-efficacy to solve social issues, and is modeled around Rossman’s 7-step Creativity Model Rossman, J (1931).

Participants sketch an ideal version of their village and observe the ‘gaps’ or difficulties in their community. A structured discussion around these gaps follows this first step, during which the participants analyze possible links with other social, cultural and political phenomena. This includes listing the social problems and prioritizing them during a group discussion between the participants. Following the prioritized list of community issues, the participants reflect on their own ability to address these problems. Using the “Circle of Control” exercise, participants determine their level of control for each issue, organizing them into three categories (or circles): 1) We have complete control to solve the problem

Ideal Village activity being conducted with a 3D model of the village.

ourselves; 2) We can solve this problem, but will need help from outside; and 3) There is no way to solve this problem.

The participants are guided through a discussion about these circles and naturally begin discussing possible solutions to address all the social problems listed. A critical analysis of these solutions for their advantages, disadvantages and feasibility is followed by deciding the best course of solving a social problem.

Once a solution is selected, the group begins strategizing on how to best implement it, discussing possible challenges, resources required, and other important factors. In the end, an action plan to address a particular (or more) social problem is drawn with a timeline.

This activity has been conducted as a part of the 2nd Foundations’ Personal Capacity Building and Social Problem Solving workshop. It has also been incorporated as part of the Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality’s activities done in villages.

maker SKILLS CASE STUDY

Cultivating the Maker Mindset

Imparting Skills that Forge Young Tinkerers

in middle and high school, keeping in mind the additional need for contextualizing it to a rural audience. The workshops consist of training on functional skills such as 3D modeling, comprehending design and user interaction and learning to tinker and prototype with local materials.

We realize, based on our experiThe makerspace and maker ence conducting maker workshops, workshops encourage students to collaborate & problem-solve. the need to explore creative ways to teach these skills in a colorful, funThe recent thrust to impart 21st cenfilled environment, utilizing a probtury skills in schools has created a paradigm lem-based approach to motivate children in tinshift in education in many countries. This sug- kering. Further the need to contextualize the gests a shift in the notion of literacy to include learning experience offering meaningful projvarious frameworks of thinking skills that aim ects and analogies are critical to effective comto develop higher-order cognition in children. munication of concepts and higher-order skills.

As of 2017, the 2nd Foundation workshops The maker workshops have inspired us to seek have been conducted for over 2800 students more engaging ways to introduce tinkering in in 43 schools in the south Indian states of resource-constrained environments such as Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. rural schools in India.

Maker skills can be broadly defined as The 2nd Foundation makerspace at AMMAteaching cognitive skills such as critical think- CHI Labs provides access to digital prototyping, creativity, collaboration and spatial rea- ing tools such as 3D printers, Laser cutters, and soning through hands-on tinkering, design CNC routers. The makerspace is designed to thinking, and digital prototyping activities. foster creative projects with its large collection Our experience in conducting maker skills has of tools for woodworking, metalworking and informed us on how the children perceived electronics prototyping. The makerspace acts these skills, their inhibitions, the challenges as our community engagement center for conthey face and what support needs to be ducting maker workshops where we meld art extended to them to overcome these obstacles and engineering to spark childrens’ imaginaand to nurture their creativity. The maker tion and creativity. workshops are designed primarily for children 29

learning technologies

for rural india

Vital Skills Such as Complex Problem Solving & Collaboration with Peers to Succeed are a Must for Future Job Seekers 30

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

4 Bridging the Gap On one hand, India faces a dearth of skilled labor and on the other, the vocational training infrastructure required to train the millions simply do not exist.

AMMACHI Labs aims to bridge this gap using its innovative Computerized Vocational Educational and Training (CVET) methodologies using a blend of tablet based MOOC style multimedia content, haptic simulators, serious games for learning, and pedagogical strategies on the ground using blended and peer to peer learning techniques. Our courses and learning technologies are designed with a keen focus on user experience, cultural sensitivity & scalability.

In creating content for our CVET courses, we are also helping immortalize the skills and teaching styles of our subject matter experts.

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learning technologies

E-Content for Skill Development

Our rapidly expanding roster of CVET (Computerized Vocational Education and Training) courses addresses this by capturing and disseminating the knowledge of subject matter experts from a wide variety of trades.

content in context

AMMACHI Labs has a team of

instructional designers, multimedia artists and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) who develop high quality content tailored for rural communities.

We have international experts in tailoring, hair care, tiling, plumbing among other trades volunteering with us to develop our extensive roster of courses. We simultaneously ensure that these SMEs’ expertise are taken to the masses while at the same time ensuring that rural India gets access to high quality vocational training content following international standards. We consult with the Indian government and various other actors in the vocational training space to align our content with national standards like the MES (Modular Employment Skills) and the NOS (National Occupational Standards). Our content production quality has also been recognized by the Ministry of Human Resources Development and the National Instructional Media Institute.

low-literacy users

In our quest to bring quality vocational education content to the masses, we have 32

Addressing children’s first teachers through empowering mothers with a multidisciplinary, computerized approach. The tablet based Rural Toilet Builder course gives students a selfpaced, DIY platform to become proficient in construction skills while also developing capacity in digital literacy. Here Jyothi and her child in Byse refer to the tablet for instructions.

developed various technologies and methodologies to implement solutions grounded with a deep understanding of the psychographics and technographics of our target populations. Keeping User Experience (UX) principles in mind, our designers, artists and engineers create learning solutions that are designed to work across India’s rich cultural and linguistic diversity.

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

User Experiences for Low Literacy Users

In targeting a growing population with limited access to skills training of any sort, we faced numerous challenges, including language and cultural differences, resource limits, gender boundaries and, in many cases, the simple lack of trainee motivation. In striving to serve populations with minimal computer literacy, one must carefully design the user interface to accommodate their cultural, social, educational, motivational and other differences.

We conduct field tests to determine the best possible graphical representations for first

Women studying tailoring together through the MySangham eLearning platform.

time computer users. Such research on icon design assists in creating our rich user interfaces from haptics UI’s to our visual eLearning interfaces, serious games and more.

Accessible Learning 25 Courses 9 Regional Languages 33

learning technologies

MySangham Learning Portal

MySangham is an online portal and community that will bring skill based education and employment within reach of everyone. The portal enables anyone to upload multilingual content that would be accessible to all especially the mobile-first, cloud-first generation. The Content Management System ( CMS ) and the Learning Management System (LMS) form the crux of this portal which facilitates creation, curation and dissemination of multilingual vocational education and training content. MySangham offers content creators an easy-to-use platform to develop multimedia based instructional material, interactive activities (2D games), 3D tool libraries, assessments making it easy for anyone to create multilingual courses.

lessons plans to ensure that the learning experience is seamless across the classroom and the workspaces whether they be a toilet construction site or a tailoring center. Our tablet and paper based assessments also take into account the blended nature of the courses. We also pioneer in the use of peer to peer learning techniques to build up communities of practice in our villages, recreating the features of expert guilds which centuries back put India at the forefront of the world in many industries.

blended learning

Our social workers and engineers have found that simply throwing digital learning technologies at the villages will not lead to optimal learning conditions. We designed blended learning strategies to take into account the unstructured nature of imparting informal vocational education in the villages. Our facilitators use the tablet based multimedia content and their associated 34

At a tailoring class in Ransai Maharashtra, a trainer uses a tablet with a traditional chalk board to impart the lesson. Using ICT and traditional methods allow for flexible classrooms to adapt to the ever changing learning environments in rural villages.

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

Game-Based Learning We explore Game Based Learning (GBL) approaches to teaching essential life and technical skills.

The games we design have a strong

emphasis on peer to peer learning so that when the youth of the villages participate in these games together, they enjoy the opportunity to open up, communicate and think critically about important topics in a safe environment.

Abhi Ya Kabhi is a powerful learning tool used in villages across India.

abhi ya kabhi

One of the other challenges facing social workers in villages is to engage the people in constructive dialogue and thoughtful analysis of their lives, situations and key decisions. There is a huge requirement for a low risk, low barrier platform for facilitating this process. “Abhi Ya Kabhi” (AYK), meaning “If not now, then when?”, was developed as a board game to address these issues and over time it has evolved into a powerful icebreaker and learning tool used in villages

across India adopted by the MA Math.

Through its fun and engaging board game play, a participatory design in community engagement is created which helps spark a larger conversation in their community about their issues and ways to solve them.

Game orientation with women in Indhpur, Himachal Pradesh

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learning technologies

Haathi Mera Sathi board game play.

haathi mera saathi

The HMS board game serves as a tool for teaching programming and computational thinking to underprivileged children in rural India. It provides a metaphor and gameplay for embodied and tangible games, and creates a soft early ramp up into the conceptual and digital space of learning to code. So far, more than a hundred children across 10 villages have been trained in HMS. A companion PC/Android game is also being piloted, with an engaging visual block based environment mapped to the Python programming language.

and villages. Observing that waste sorting is crucial to the waste management, we developed a serious game to teach sorting skills using the Kinect depth sensing camera.

The game has engaged many a young and old user alike to start thinking about sorting waste whenever possible.

Student trying his hand at the ABC Waste Sorting Game.

waste sorting game

Our parent NGO, Embracing the World launched the Amala Bharatham (Clean India) Campaign (ABC) in 2012, conducting regular cleanup drives of rivers, roadsides 36

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

a sense of agency CASE STUDY

Abhi Ya Kabhi in Himachal Pradesh

enhanced engagement with serious games Abhi Ya Kabhi training session for teachers.

“During the playtesting session one of the players took out a loan to buy a car and needed to repay the loan in the game in order to win.

He tried his best to do all the right things in the game like spend cautiously. But in the end, he reached a situation where it was not possible for him to pay back the loan, and lost the game. After the session, the player revealed to us that he had actually planned to purchase a used-car for 1 lakh Rupees (approximately 1700 USD) in real life the following week. He realized through the game that if he bought the car, it would be too hard to manage his finances and decided to hold off until he was more financially secure to manage the

purchase. When they played the game, players got the experience of making decisions and experienced the consequences as well.

The idea that they could make their own decisions, evaluate the options, and alter the outcome, was empowering for them. The sense of agency that they experience through the game enhances their engagement and conversation around the decisions they​make.”

sreeram kongeseri Phd Researcher AMMACHI Labs & CGEWE

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CASE STUDY Learning Spaces in Remote Places brick-and-mortar centers & a mobile learning unit More than 60% of India’s population lives

in the rural and tribal areas of the country.

This means that access to proper VET infrastructure is hindered with economic, social, cultural and gender barriers. AMMACHI Labs started preparing the infrastructure for conducting the computerised vocational classes and life skills. This initial set up included desktop computers, laptops, tablet PCs, computer accessories along with the generators for providing backup electricity.

Our team trained more than 3,500 women in various vocational trades using this setup.

More than 100 life skills training sessions were conducted in these learning spaces. In hindsight, these learning spaces turned out to be a crucial factor in encouraging women to actively participate in our sessions. Many of them kept coming back to our centres after their initial training was completed.

Access to proper training facilities is a huge issue that needs to be addressed and the solution to this should be multi-pronged.

As with any successful training center, an eco-system of activities, institutions and opportunities is required to support a vocational training centre. So setting up of such a brick-and-mortar center requires huge capital investment without any guarantee of participation by other stakeholders. Our Mobile Vocational Education (MoVE) project was piloted to test the feasibility of a mobile learning space that could act as the set up for people to get interested in training pro 38

Mobile Vocational Education

grams for further training later on. The MoVE project was commissioned in 2013 to cover the tribal areas of Idukki, Kerala where it was not possible to set up brick-and-motor enters to conduct vocational and life skills training. The MoVE learning space conducted training on various vocational trades including fabric painting and soap making. Training was conducted in more than 12 remote locations in Idukki. During the amount of time that it would have taken to set up a brick-and-mortar center (1 month), the MoVE team was able to train 500 women in vocational skills. Since then the MoVE team travelled to more than 6 states of India conducting training in life skills through games and entrepreneurship. As part of our next pilot, we plan to repurpose the MoVE van to a design thinking learning space. This will be affiliated with the 2nd Foundation program.

Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, former President of India, receives a demo of the MoVE van during the International Conference on Sustainable Development and Governance at Amrita’s Ettimidai Campus in December, 2012.

scoping study Project

The NORRAG Project

Revisiting the Promise of ICT for Skill Development in the Construction Industry among the Subsistent Informal Sector in South Africa & India: a scoping study The collaborating team members of the NORRAG Project gather for a Project Coordination Meeting in Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa, April 2017.

AMMACHI Labs engaged in a multidimen-

sional scoping study with the REAL Center of Witwatersrand University in South Africa, facilitated by NORRAG of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Switzerland, to better understand the dynamics of skill development among unreached populations and the role ICT plays.

The study’s focus on the subsistent informal sector and the construction industry emerged through a series of round table discussions among the collaborating partners, to identify India and South Africa’s most pressing skill development needs and unreached population. The scoping study strove to: 1) Pinpoint knowledge gaps between policy and practice, in the provision of vocational training for construction trades among the subsistent informal within India and South Africa 2) Investigate the interplay between TVET and ICT policies and practice, with a focus on the

subsistent informal sector and construction trades in the two countries.

Over the course of the 18 monthlong exploratory study AMMACHI Labs engaged in cross-country field visits in South Africa and India, project coordination meetings and forum events held in the partnering countries, to refine the focus of the study based on findings from the field and share preliminary insights with relevant TVET stakeholders. AMMACHI Labs and the study’s collaborators spoke with national level policy makers to share insights gathered and learn about emergent policy initiatives that specifically address the needs of the target population. The scoping study also served as a platform to identify and exchange best practices and lessons learned with training providers that integrate ICT in construction trade training and target vulnerable communities.

The study’s findings published in a final report, reflect a greater understanding of the structural issues impacting effective skill development among the subsistent informal in South Africa and India, respectively. Based on this informed understanding, the study provides recommendations for policies and practices that more acutely reflect the skill development needs of the informal sector awell as areas for further research regarding ICT-integrated TVET. 39

humanitarian technologies

scalable solutions

Our Focus is on Making Low Cost, Durable and Easily Maintainable Designs, Along with Members of the Community that we are Designing for 40

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

5 Action Oriented Technologists who are removed from problems and contexts end up designing technologies which are either useless or end up causing harm to the intended population, and this is especially true in the case for technologies intended for rural development. Ammachi Labs avoids this “amplification” effect by following an action oriented research approach, where our engineers go out into the villages, engage with the community and understand the context in which the solutions need to be designed, which they then follow with a mix of rapid prototyping and regular field tests, leading to practical and scalable solutions. Our focus is on making low cost, durable and easily maintainable designs while making sure that the community being targeted are involved in the design process.

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humanitarian technologies

Augmenting Agriculture

Though automation remains a threat to many rural jobs, it is likely that it would take many more years for the labor intensive Indian agricultural sector to fully embrace advanced automation technologies. At the same time, migration from rural areas into the cities are causing labor shortages. We have come up with several solutions to make farms self-reliant and productive, and to ease the drudgery and health related risks of many rural vocations.

rice transplanter

Rice saplings need to be planted with regular spacing to optimize water and nutrient intake. This process is very labor intensive and leads to back problems and repetitive stress injuries in the farm laborers. Though there are technologies which address this problem, we felt the need to develop a low cost semi-automated alternative, intended for farmers who cannot afford expensive automation equipment and farm labor. Our “Ri-Cycle” design implements the efficient Legowo row planting system and it is easily manufactured and maintained, as it requires only cheap bicycle parts to be built. The design also comes in a cart based variant.

42 Engineers and farmers testing out the “Ricycle” together.

automating coconut dehusking

Coconut dehusking is a labor intensive and expensive process crucial to agricultural productivity in coconut growing states like Kerala which faces an acute shortage of farm labor. Faced with this problem, our engineers have developed a cable driven parallel robot for automating the process of coconut dehusking in large and medium sized farms. The robot assists the mechanized dehusking process by fetching coconuts from heaps aided by computer vision and then autonomously loads them into a dehusking machine’s hopper. As the system is intended for unstructured environments, it was also developed

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

to be both portable and reconfigurable. We have developed an efficient anchor point estimation technique and installation procedure for the system.

automated vertical farming

Vertical farms are the newest technique used in areas constrained by the lack of agricultural land. With farmlands in India increasingly getting fragmented with every passing generation, it is important to explore the use of vertical spaces for farming while keeping the labor requirements to a minimum. This requires low cost automation solutions.

Therefore, we designed a cart-rail Cartesian robot on which can be mounted either a pesticide sprayer mechanism or a harvester arm.

Unlike a conventional system that usually uses rack and pinion or limited to one degree of freedom(1 DoF), the proposed system uses a cable that actuates the entire motion of the cart providing 2 DOF. Our design has also achieved a 1cm position accuracy.

The Husky Field Robot.

Village community members interacting with the Husky Field Robot during a Human-Robot Interaction study.

gesture based interaction with field robots

Often, we find that advanced technologies take only a few years to go from expensive to dirt cheap, thanks to the exponential nature of technological progress. This begs us to ask the question—What happens when the robots start coming into the villages? How would a technology illiterate user interact with them?

We address these questions using an action-oriented approach grounded in ethnographic research, and we undertook a study to observe human robot interaction by observing the manner in which tribal youth ‘instructed’ a remotely operated Husky field robot to do certain tasks. These findings are being incorporated into the building of a gesture based control system for field robots which any villager will be able to operate with minimal training or supervision.

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humanitarian technologies

which provides assistance in carrying load by distributing the load across the body evenly unlike the conventional method. The device has been validated by biomechanical studies and field trials, and 13 copies of the device will soon be distributed to villagers in Uttarkhand.

soil sampling robot

A woman in Uttarkhand utilizing the wearable assistive device to take the load off of her daily work.

wearable assistive device

In the state of Uttarkhand, at the foothills of the Himalayas, our engineers observed that essential commodities like gas cylinders, food, cow feed and other essential supplies were daily carried uphill by the villagers in baskets made of bamboo skin hung on the back by a thin strap running around their shoulders. This leads to excessive loading on the shoulders and vertebra, leading to musculo-skeletal disorders in the future. Our mechanical engineers then designed a device 44

In post-disaster scenarios, especially those dealing with soil contamination by hazardous materials, it is important that soil quality be measured without putting human lives at risk. Our engineers designed and implemented an autonomous soil sampling solution based on the platform for monitoring the presence of heavy metals in landfills. The design consists of a soil sampling mechanism mounted on a Husky which auto-navigates through landfills and reaches the identified locations for soil sampling. The robot has a specially designed auger for collected the soil top layer from the landfill. A hybrid SLAM algorithm was also developed for navigating the robot.

AMMACHI Labs engineers designed and implemented an autonomous soil sampling solution based on the platform for monitoring the presence of heavy metals in landfills.

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

Experiential Learning CASE STUDY Live-In-Labs

experiential learning opportunities for students

Students come from all over the world for this experiential learning opportunity. Shown here are high school students from Westminster School in Atlanta, Georgia.

The Live-in-Labs ™ program aims to “My experience in Bhoi Sahi, Odisha was absoexpose international youth to problems faced by rural communities in India. Through experiential learning opportunities, participants put theory into practice by generating innovative solutions, thereby facilitating critical and collaborative problem solving abilities of participants. The program allows participants to study, observe, and interact with rural populations while living in rural communities to gain a better understanding of challenges in the areas of Health & Livelihood, Education & Technology, Environment & Farming, Energy, and Infrastructure & Basic Facilities. Students have come from EPFL, University of Porto, University of Ottawa and many others from India.

lutely incredible. Working with a different culture, maneuvering through local dialects and working with multiple people was a learning experience. Moreover, AMMACHI Labs enabled me to pursue my passion of health and development by pairing me with an initiative to teach rural women to build and maintain their own toilets in order to end open defecation. My experience on the field in India encouraged me to pursue my Masters in Development Practice in my home country to further my knowledge of sustainable initiatives.”

vidya nair

Honours B.A in Arts, University of Ottawa Pursuing Masters of Development Practice University of Waterloo

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humanitarian technologies

Augmenting Construction

The construction industry in India has a huge skill shortage, a problem which can be alleviated by eliminating the need for labor through automation, by democratizing skill education or by reducing the degree of skill required to complete certain tasks.

Though AMMACHI Labs puts a lot of emphasis on the skill education aspect, we also design low cost solutions which can even be operated by unskilled laborers.

mould-based toilet building

The CGEWE runs a community led sanitation program in the villages and the Ammachi Labs engineers who spent time in these projects have come up with a mould-based toilet design which reduces the time needed for toilet construction down significantly while at the same time reducing the need for expert masons who can plaster the toilet walls. The moulds are handed over to local women-led shgs which then use them to rapidly build toilets in their community together while generating an income.

Mould Based Toilet design, implemented in Byse Village, Karnataka.

smart tool

The smart tool (Skill Mentoring and Assistance in Real Time) is a motion monitoring and audio-visual feedback device for students in Vocational Education and Training (VET) to assist in minimizing and correcting errors in the use of occupational tools. smart is easily attached to any vocational tool and can guide the user to conform to specific spatiotemporal trajectories and orientation as described by template shape. smart uses a low cost 46

accelerometer, gyroscopes and an input interface that are integrated with the micro controller and an algorithm has been developed to provide guidance for tool use.

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

#robotics4good international event

raha 2016 Conference at Amrita

robotics & automation for humanitarian application technical program of reviewed papers, as well as invited leaders in the field who presented papers on major topics.

There was a panel discussion, workshops, poster sessions, a PhD forum, industry exhibits, and a contest for undergraduate and graduate students.

RAHA 2016 brought together top researchers, practitioners, and experts from the field of robotics for humanitarian applications. There were 6 plenary and 16 keynote speakers from top universities and industry. Notable speakers were Dr. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia Univerity, Dr. Vijay Bhatkar of International Multiversity, Dr. Ronald Arkin of Georgia Tech, Dr. Hajime Asama of University of Tokyo, Dr. Meg Jones of UN Women, Dr. Bernardine Dias of Diyunu Consulting LLC, Dr. Subir Kumar Saha of IIT Delhi, Dr. Brent Gillespie of University of Michigan, and many more. The conference was co-chaired by Prof. Bhavani Rao and Dr. Raj Madhavan.

Ron Arkin’s captivating Plenary Talk: “Civilized Collaboration: Ethical architectures for enforcing legal requirements and mediating social norms in HRI.”

The International Conference on

Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Applications which took place at Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham on December 18th–20th, 2016 aimed to provide a forum for scientists, engineers, field workers and policy makers to discuss current research and exchange technical ideas that advance global humanitarian action.

The conference connected technological innovators and humanitarian field workers, creating a link between fields that often are considered separate and unreAn entry of the lated. Together, the conference humanitarian robotics competition during attendees identified gaps in RAHA 2016. knowledge in the fields. The conference initiated a dialogue to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate, with the intention of increasing the effectiveness of humanitarian efforts on the ground.

The conference included a

women’s Empowerment

and gender equality

The Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality Promotes Societal Transformation Through Participatory Action Research, Implementation & Education 48

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

6 Focus on Women Women are half the population of any country. Yet, despite their numbers, women remain the largest vulnerable group and, ironically, they are the primary care-givers of other vulnerable groups such as children, elderly, physically and mentally disabled. Research shows that with each additional year of education that women receive, their contribution to the GDP of the region increases more than that of men, especially in rural areas. Helping women increase their education levels and build capacities to earn a decent livelihood have proven to have a direct impact on the capacities of their children to achieve their potential in physical, emotional and intellectual spheres. Furthermore, studies show,that the well-being of a woman in her roles in her family and society brings stability to the entire community. Despite our knowledge about this and irrespective of a multitude of efforts to address and remedy women’s vulnerability, large swaths of women are denied equality due to social, political and cultural forces.

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Women’s Empowerment

Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality

The Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality (CWEGE) of Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham promotes societal transformation through: participatory action research, education and implementation. These three activities interact with the different sectors of society and knowledge-sharing in the context of service to humanity.

our work

The CWEGE was established to discover and share effective strategies that can both empower women and work around the complex social restrictions on women’s empowerment. Empowering marginalized populations, especially women, with greater economic, social, and leadership opportunities has been shown to have a profound effect on entire communities. Women’s empowerment programs; however, face numerous challenges from every sector including political, economic, social-cultural, and psychological.

These pressing issues need to be addressed through a holistic approach. It is through the dynamic interaction of Research to identify key issues and share best practices, Academics to train the next generation of field workers, and project implementation to study impact and improve design that sustainable and positive change happens. Our work revolves around six verticals that map directly with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Education and Skill Development; Health and Sanitation; Community/ Personal Safety and Security; Economic Stability and Livelihoods; 50

CWEGE Activities Master and PhD level courses Engagement in participatory action research projects for mapping women’s vulnerabilities Designing and developing tool kits for women’s empowerment and vulnerability mapping.

Collaborating with leading universities and institutions towards the advancement of women’s empowerment

Climate Change and Disaster; and Social and Cultural Environments.

Research

As with all of the research conducted at Amrita, the CWEGE is committed to producing research and development that will have real and positive impact on society, with knowledge gathering and sharing in mind. A dedicated team of international researchers

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

and advisors will guide the development of theory and practice to address the most pressing issues facing women’s empowerment.

Advances in the field will be shared through publication in peer-reviewed journals and conferences.

Academics

The CWEGE presently hosts two graduate programs: A PhD program and a Masters of Social Work under the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Both courses train students to engage deeply with the relevant areas of study under the Six Verticals and to apply their knowledge practically. The course work is tied with field work, and all students spend extended time working closely with communities in villages across the country.

Empowerment: Community Sanitation through Democratic Participation project from 2017– 2019. The goal of the project is to support women through skill development in mobilizing their community and local government to improve sanitation and community health.

The Women’s Empowerment: Sanitation project is an ongoing effort to provide skill training to women in basic masonry and plumbing, along with seed funding, to build and maintain their own toilets, promoting toilet use among their village as well.

Projects

The CWEGE puts the most emphasis on bringing the knowledge and research gained into application to best serve society. As a key member of the MA Math’s Village adoption project Amrita SeRVe, the Center deploys empowerment and skill development projects in villages within each state of India. To date there have been two major, pan-India projects in these villages. The first is a continuation of the fruitful relationship between the MA Math and the un.

The United Nations Democracy Fund has partially funded the Women 51

Women’s Empowerment

Our Field Work Approach

Our holistic approach to women’s empowerment factors in the different domains of empowerment such as economic, social, legal, and psychological.

Women are at the center of the family,

and therefore the center of any community.

Our work at the CWEGE is primarily for women in rural India. Together with them, we identify what environmental, political, economic, social, and personal vulnerabilities they face and work to figure out what the best ways are to bring about desired changes.

In concert, we then decide on what physical and psychological capacities are required to address the identified vulnerabilities. Through AMMACHI Labs’ cVET and Life Skills training courses, along with a dedicated field team and strategic deployment model, we help to strengthen those capacities, thereby increasing their coping abilities. Our approach helps to create and support communities of empowered women leaders.

indicators of empowerment

The CWEGE defines empowerment as a process of development where a person’s or group’s capabilities expand, allowing for a person to achieve the life they want and for the overall community to improve. We measure empowerment broadly by four Indicators of Empowerment: The Women’s Empowerment projects within The CWEGE are designed and deployed with these indicators in mind.

Through our extensive experience in villages across the country, we have come to learn several best practices which ensure a project’s success and sustainability:

Indicators of Empowerment economic empowerment: 1 Access to opportunities and resources 2 Earning potential social and democratic empowerment: 3 Critical thinking and decision making 4 Control over one’s life inside and outside the home

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AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

Sakri Bhen, a Change Maker in Nani Borwai Village, Gujarat.

Participatory Approach

The real experts of any community, and the true measure of empowerment are the community members themselves. For a project to work best, it must be co-created with the target population from design, to implementation, to impact evaluation, and beyond.

The field staff must always approach the communities with respect and sensitivity, imbibing the spirit of Seva, or selfless service.

Community-Centric

Empowering an individual without considering the social, political, and economic structures in which the person lives greatly reduces the sustainability of any project. The CWEGE projects make a concerted effort to create strong social groups among women and to encourage them to address the larger structures which may keep them marginalized. An empowered woman leads to an empowered community and vice-versa.

Values-Based

In line with the values of Amrita and inspired by the life of Mata Amritanandamayi, the Women’s Empowerment projects, field staff, and research approach are designed with compassion and meant to encourage the community to higher goals. The life skills courses and vocational skills provided are selected to support personal growth and healthy, community development. The women are encouraged to examine their own values and to support activities which serve the greater good.

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Democratic Participatio

project

WE:CSDP–Community Sanitation

COMMUNITY SANITATION THROUGH DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION The Women Empowerment: Community

Sanitation through Democratic Participation (WE:CSDP) project (UDF-15-IND-667) was launched in February 2017. It is a two year, pan-India initiative jointly funded with the United Nations Democracy Fund. It aims to address the issues of inadequate community sanitation, women’s health, and water management in rural India through improving democratic representation of women in community leadership and local governance.

The project targets one village in 21 states in India, and aims to empower at least 5,000 women in rural Indian communities to champion sanitation and community development, eventually reaching their entire village, or 30,000 indirect beneficiaries.

Participating women will receive continuous life skill training, will conduct sanitation campaigns, and will organize and mobilize efforts to implement key community actions to access government programs, such as the Swachh Bharat Mission, that specifically promotes sanitation. This community mobilization and training effort is designed

to efficiently reach entire communities in a short amount of time. It will also provide strength and support to the women advocating and petitioning to their local governments to address social and environmental issues in their villages. It is in line with the Government of India’s commitment to improving sanitation and rural development, as well as the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

In Kanti village, Haryana: the Advocacy Self Help Group takes a pledge to make their village open defecation free and promote healthy living, 2017.

The WE:CSDP project aims to empower at least 5,000 women and indirectly benefit 30,000 beneficiaries 21 Community Organizers 300 Champions 5,000 Change Agents 30,000 Indirect Beneficiaries WE:CSDP

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT: COMMUNITY SANITATION THROUGH DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION

on we: csdp Project Deliverables & Accomplishments as of December 2017

Outcome 1

Increased Women’s Individual Capabilities & Awareness on Sanitation & Personal Development

output 1.1

TTT Workshops for 42 women COs (Q1 & Q4) 2 weeks

1 event successfully completed

output 1.2

Delivery of computerized LifeSkills/Life Enrichment Education to Champions and Change Agents

269 SHG members plus 648 women participated in 21 Villages

Outcome 2

Increased Women’s Collective Capabilities in Sanitation & Social Development

output 2.1

Ideal Village Activity & Vulnerability Mapping

output 2.2

Community-Led ODF Campaign Initiatives Mobilizing 5,000 Women as Change Agents

9584 Participants from 28 Villages (21 states)

output 2.3

168 Life Skills Community Events

by ASHGs (8 per Village)

238 LEE Events on a Range of Topics, and 46 Clean Up Drives

output 2.4

21 Advocacy Self-Help Groups formed by 300 Women Champions

22 SHGs with 269 Women Participants

Outcome 3

13 Completed

Increased Women’s Participation & Stronger Voice in Sanitation Policy Making & Community Action

output 3.1

Water Quality Management & Monitoring by 21 ASHGs

Water Testing Completed in 18 Villages and Results Reported to Local Government

output 3.2

2 Government-ASHG Meetings (1 per milestone)

68 Documented meetings initiated by the women in the SHGs.

output 3.3

National Development Workshop for ASHGs

Scheduled for Spring, 2018

output 3.4

ASHGs Community Action Proposal to Policy Brief on Policy Recommendations

Scheduled for Spring, 2018

legal empowerment CASE STUDY

Right to Information

legal empowerment through democratic participation The law can be a powerful ally,

when equipped with the knowledge of how it works, and confidence. Women who learned it through AMMACHI Labs awareness sessions are now taking actions to protect themselves (claim their rights) and develop their communities through legal avenues which they were previously denied. They have written applications to the local government in order to demand the working of basic services such as road, water, light, etc.

In the village of Kanti, Haryana, for instance, when the water motor by which running water is dispensed throughout the village was taken away by the private water company, due to a disagreement over payment, the community led by our empowered women submitted a joint complaint to the local government office. A mere three days later, the water pump was re-installed, to the joy of the villagers who, for the first time in Seema, a legal expert at the CWEGE, leads a Legal Awareness Workshop for the women’s group in Indhpur village, Himachal Pradesh.

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Champions of Change in Kanti village, Haryana demand the bank recognize their SHG and are successful.

their lives, felt the power to make a lasting difference in their community. In the legal awareness sessions, an emphasis is given on rti (Right to Information) knowledge, which is a powerful tool to obtain access to information on government schemes and services and bypass the circle of bureaucratic corruption. Illustrating that legal awareness can benefit those of all ages, Sira Devi, an elderly woman in the village of Dunda, who was struggling to access her old age pension, pressurized the government officer to file an RTI application, and it was immediately granted.

Students in Lucknow write their names for the first time. Literacy is a source of empowerment and enhances sanitation initiatives. As the women procure materials and manage their own inventories for toilet building, they develop the confidence to succeed.

Women’s Empowerment

UNESCO Chair & Mapping Vulnerabilities

In the fall of 2016, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham and UNESCO inaugurated India’s first ever Chair on Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality. The UNESCO Chair furthers goals of the Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality and promotes international, inter-university cooperation and networking to enhance institutional capacities and collaborative work.

Research. Education. Practice.

Designing tools and methods for effective interventional strategies towards the empowerment of women and strengthening gender equality with community’s active and inclusive participation by focusing on 6 holistic verticals incorporating all SDG’s, understanding and mapping the vulnerabilities in communities, to finally support India’s progress towards achieving the UN’s 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development. As the UNESCO

Chairholder, Prof. Bhavani Rao and the Center for Women’s Empowerment and Gender Equality will support India’s progress towards achieving the UN ’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Understanding the vulnerabilities of women and the interplay between these vulnerabilities in a comprehensive way is the key to designing effective and optimal interventional strategies.

Prof. Bhavani Rao with Dr. Peter Wells at the inaugration of Amrita University’s UNESCO CHAIR in Paris in 2017.

Universities such as Amrita have a guiding and strategic role to play. This UNESCO Chair will be at the crossroads of research and action, with the ambition to develop toolkits focusing on vital areas and better mapping of vulnerabilities.”

Dr. peter wells

Chief of Higher Education Section UNESCO

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AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

From left: Mata Amritanandamayi (Amma), Dr. Peter Wells, Dr. Gopinathan, Dr. Venkat Rangan and Dr. Ruchira Kamboj at the inaugration of Amrita University’s UNESCO Chair in Paris in 2017.

Dr. Ruchira Kamboj speaking at the inaugration of Amrita University’s UNESCO CHAIR in Paris in 2017.

“This is certainly the first-ever UNESCO chair in this discipline.

What is truly remarkable is the strategy, where it is proposed to map out vulnerabilities of women and girls at various levels and from different perspectives, and through research, study, training, and an exchange of best practices, to find the best possible solutions, replicable by others. My thanks to Amrita for the inspired idea and for the beautiful project. I am confident that through this chair, which is Amma’s and UNESCO’s gift, Amrita will make sure that both the ceiling and the floor for women will be raised.”

Dr. ruchira kamboj

Ambassador & Permanent Representative of India to UNESCO, Paris

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

UNESCO Chair in Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (India)

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Women’s Empowerment

AI for Social Good

These days, Artificial Intelligence is perceived as a threat to gainful employment and for a few, even as a threat to human wellbeing. While AI needs to be used carefully, this misunderstanding of AI’s potentials as a tool limits its applications for social good. At the CWEGE, an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists and social science researchers are combining advances in AI and Machine Learning to create a suite of technologies to understand social vulnerabilities in rural communities, especially surrounding women.

the vm toolkit

The AI for Social Good research work at CWEGE seeks to create a comprehensive vulnerability mapping toolkit targeting policymakers, NGOs, social workers and social scientists to design interventions leveraging points of change, identified by the toolkit.

This project aims to collect data about women and girls, and will use technology and existing vulnerability mapping frameworks to develop an innovative new toolkit that will map the broad range of vulnerabilities in key areas. The toolkit will include novel data collection mechanisms like location based games and tabletop games along with sourcing geographical and climate data from partners like the Indian Space Research Organization’s Bhuvan geographic information system. Machine learning and data visualization techniques are being used by the team to generate insights into ways in which risk, response & outcome variables across domains like health & sanitation, education, climate change, demographics influence each other.

The toolkit will function as a decision making software/app to explore the plenitude of strengths and vulnerabilities, group and rank them, formulate solutions, assess 60

risks, identify constraints and alternatives, and structure preferences and trade-offs; all with the aim to help to determine and design solutions and policy interventions that address the vulnerabilities, empower women, and advance sustainable development goals.

I am a computer scientist with a focus on AI. I was very impressed both by the quality of the scientific work done by the team and the general direction being driven by the needs of the Indian Villages. This work contains many challenges to AI research.” dr. peter struss

Department of Computer Science Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Informatics Techn.Univ. Munich Germany

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

Data Visualization workshop

NRSC & ISRO Workshop on Bhuvan

An Indian geo-platform and online geo-portal “Demonstration Bhuvan with emphasis on Data Visualisation, Data Download, Disaster Management Support and Consuming Bhuvan Web Services.” Shri D. Giri Babu, Head, Bhuvan Systems, NRSC presented “Development of Mobile Applications.”

Later on, Ms. Sonal, Scientist, Bhuvan Systems, NRSC led the final session on “Demonstration on Bhuvan Platform and Development using APIs.” Further collaborations between Bhuvan GIS Team and Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham are in process. Web-GIS Bhuvan systems, data visualization, Bhuvan web services, and development of mobile applications are possible areas of collaboration and research which are in discussion.

Shri. S. S. Rajashekar, Head, Application Development, NRSC, led the first session, “Demonstration Bhuvan with emphasis on Data Visualisation, Data Download, Disaster Management Support and Consuming Bhuvan Web Services.”

On October 13th, 2017 AMMACHI Labs

and the Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality organized a demonstration and workshop at the Amrita campus with top experts from the National Remote Sensing Centre from Hyderabad, India.

Bhuvan is an Indian geoplatform and online geoportal, which allows users to explore a 2D/3D representation of the surface of the Earth. The browser is specifically tailored to view India, offering the highest resolution in this region and providing content in four local languages. Bhuvan provides timely disaster support services, free satellite data and a products download facility and rich thematic datasets. It also acts as a platform for hosting government data.

Shri. S. S. Rajashekar, Head, Application Development, NRSC led the first session

During a collaborative visit

by Prof. Bhavani Rao and researchers from CWEGE and Dr.Y.V.N. Krishnamurthy, Director, NRSC, in Hyderabad, following National Space Week.

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Women’s Empowerment

Mapping Vulnerabilities Along the SDGs

The establishment of the Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham’s UNESCO Chair will support India’s progress towards achieving the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Understanding vulnerabilities in communities is the key to designing effective intervention strategies to enable women everywhere to gain full access to basic human rights. We have outlined six verticals which align with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

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AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

UN Status of Women international event

CSW61 at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, 2017

Professor Bhavani attended the 61st

session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in March 2017. The priority theme was women’s economic empowerment in the changing world of work. From equal pay and women’s unpaid work to decent work, removing the barriers of discrimination and investing in women’s access to digital and green economies, the conference explored key issues for women in the changing world of work.

Professor Bhavani was featured as a panelist on the plenary talk “Young Women as an Economic Force” at the CSW61 Youth Forum, attended by more than 750 youth delegates from over 80 countries. When asked, “What challenges do women face today?”

Professor Bhavani spoke on the effect of isolationism. “Women tend to become isolated, from the very bottom to the very top of society. In fact, the woman at the top of the ladder is much more likely to be within isolated work environments. Naturally, because of this,

Professor Bhavani was featured as a panelist on the plenary talk “Young Women as an Economic Force.”

women may choose not to move towards the top. No one really wants isolation. In empowering women through community-based interventions, we must think about the horizontal ladder just as much as the vertical.

We must think of moving the entire baseline up instead of just a few up the vertical. With this, let’s not only move one woman forward, let’s move entire groups of women forward.

Let’s move their families forward.”

61st session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN Headquarters in New York, March 2017.

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over 300 toilets built b 13

project

WE: Sanitation

Training Women to Become Leaders of Sanitation Development through learning plumbing and masonry Despite significant advances, sanita-

tion in India remains catastrophically poor with an estimated 560 million people (half the population) living without access to a toilet. The resulting health and social problems, especially for women and girls, has far reaching effects and is globally recognized as a priority issue. An important but relatively unexplored connection with poor sanitation is that women living in rural India are not only the largest marginalized group without access to adequate sanitation facilities, they also represent a substantial portion of India’s unskilled workers. Development

SHG members personally received their village certificate from the Honorable President of India, sri Ram Nath Kovind during a nationally publicized event.

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tactics that emphasize the participation of women have shown to be more effective in resulting in gender equitable development.

One of AMMACHI Labs’ first pilots studies in 2011 was in training a small group of women to become assistant plumbers, who have since become full-time employed plumbers at the local university and nearby town. Their great success, especially in the context of the sanitation problem, inspired the new women’s empowerment initiative, called WE: Sanitation. In this project, women in rural communities are trained in basic masonry and plumbing so that they can build

by 250 women in 2017 villAGES CERTIFIFIED ODF and maintain their own toilets, and then become leaders of sanitation development in their village. The goal is to help the villages achieve “Open Defecation Free” status and to be recognized as a Nirmal Gaon, or pure village, by the local government. By training women to build their own toilets, a collaborative dynamic emerges that can engage entire communities in the movement towards total sanitation. This approach has begun to show promise in addressing the struggle to end open defecation, raise sanitation awareness, as well as strengthen personal and community development among women living in rural India.

WE: Sanitation is currently in implementation in 18 states throughout India, and as of the end of 2017 over 300 toilets have been built by over 250 women. As of October, 2017 13 of these villages have been certified as Open Defecation Free thanks to the hard work of the participants and the success of the project training. The SHG members personally received their village certificate from the Honorable President of India, sri Ram Nath Kovind during a nationally publicized event.

Participants from AMMACHI Labs first pilot study in 2011 that trained women to become assistant plumbers.

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changemaker stories

she

Renu’s Story

safe roads for kanti village

Kanti has long suffered with roads that are full of filthy water, pathogens, and other waste. This lead to near-epidemic levels of illness, especially during the rainy seasons.

Renu, the Community Organizer for this village, took matters in her own hands after completing the we Project LEE course on sanitation. She led the women’s group and filed an application with their local government to finally build a proper road. She faced much resistance to this project because some villagers feared any road repairs would encroach on their homes. However, she did not give up and after months of hard work,

A road in Kanti Village before (top) Renu’s initiative and after (below).

she was successful and the government is now building clean, safe roads throughout the village. There has been significant decrease in illness, and she is now seen as a local leader.

Anjana’s Story

A Safe Space for Women, By Women in Nala village

Anjana is the facilitator for the Nala village training center in Uttrakhand. She had long faced many problems before joining Ammachi Labs. At her home, she had very little support from her husband and struggled to keep herself and her family safe and healthy.

She wanted desperately to care for her children, but was unable to find help from government programs or other organizations.

She then decided to join a training program to learn how to use computers, hoping she could get a job with these skills.

In 2013, she was hired by Ammachi Labs and trained to be a facilitator for the WE project. From this experience, she has gained more confidence to work in the community and has become a respected leader in her village. After a legal awareness workshop, she took the opportunity to become a Paralegal Volunteer (PLV) and received the training in October, 2017 at the district legal service authority (DLSA) court.

After her training, she immediately started conducting legal awareness programs along with the local judge. She felt even more confident after she started visiting government

months of hard work she

did not give up and after labor in both agriculture and construction. Before taking the course, Hemlatha’s main source of income was doing construction work for daily wages.

We visited Hemlatha in her home studio last spring to ask her about how her life has changed after the tailoring training. Since completing tailoring training, Hemlatha has been continuously taking orders from her village as well as the nearby village, Rajagoan. Her orders are from community members as Anjana from Nala Village. well as from the local government, in the form of school uniform orders. offices and has inspired more women to stand Her tailoring skill training has given her the up and seek assistance. Now she wants to tools and confidence to work from home, help everyone. She is supporting applicants doing something that she loves. for government pensions and schemes and she is helping women who are victims of domestic violence and harassment. Women in the village trust Anjana, they know she can help so they tell her their problems. In these communities, they never felt that there was a safe space to do that.

Hemlatha’s Story

A Grassroots Start up in Karanji

Hemlatha Poen is a graduate from the first Ammachi Labs tailoring course held in Karanji, a remote village in rural Chhattisgarh.

Hemlatha took part in the AMMACHI Labs tailoring training course in 2016. She since joined the local tailoring women’s self help group (SHG). Hemlatha lives in a simple home with her immediate and extended family. They all have various jobs, including harvesting local plants, weaving mats, and unskilled day

e was successful.

Hemlatha pictured in her home studio, working on a suit order.

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Collaborations

United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

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UNESCO Chair in Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (India)

AMMACHI Labs | CENTER FOR WOMEN’s EMPowerment & gender equality

AMRITA VISHWA VIDYAPEETHAM

Publications international book chapters: 1. Rao R. Bhavani, Srividya Sheshadri and Laura Aswati Maciuika. “Addressing the First Teachers: Education and Sustainable Development for Children, Families and Communities through Vocational Education, Technology and Life Skills Training for Women”. Children and Sustainable Development. Springer International publishing, 2017. 319-334.

international journals: 1. Sooraj Krishna, Rahul E S, Rao R Bhavani. RFID based-human localization in robot-cells for a better shared workspace interaction. CSI Transactions on ICT. 2016, 1-7.

2. Alekh V, Rahul E S, Rao R Bhavani. Comparative Study of Potential Field and Sampling Algorithms for Manipulator Obstacle Avoidance/Path Planning For Obstacle Avoidance In Robot Work Space. International Journal of Control Theory and Applications. 9(33), 2016, 71-78.

3. Saisudha V., Seeja G., Radhamani V. Pillay, Gayathri Manikutty, Rao R. Bhavani. Analysis of speed control of DC motor using LQR method. International Journal of Control Theory and Applications. 9(15), 2016, 7377-7385.

4. Seeja G., Saisudha V., Gayathri Manikutty, Rao R. Bhavani, Radhamani Pillay V. Speed Analysis of DC Motor under Load and no Load Condition using CHR Based PID and LQR Optimal Controller. International Journal of Control Theory and Applications. 9(15), 2016, 7387-7394.

5. Rajendran Sooraj, Nagarajan Akshay, T.G. Jeevan, Rao R. Bhavani. Design and Analysis of a Parallel Haptic Orthosis for Upper Limb Rehabilitation. International Journal of Engineering and Technology.5, 2013, ISSN: 2319-8613.

6. Jamie Otelsberg, Nagarajan Akshay, Rao R. Bhavani, Issues in the User Interface Design of a Content Rich Vocational Training Application for Digitally Illiterate Users. International Journal of Social, Human Science and Engineering.01/2013; 7:269 – 275.

international conference proceedings: pending publication 1. Jogesh Nanda, Rajendran S Vishnu, Rao R Bhavani Experimental Evaluation of the Dynamic Performance of Ingeniously developed Wearable Assistive Device. Technological innovations in ICT for agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2018).

2. Rajendran S Vishnu, Rahul K, Aymeric Maurin, Harish Mohan T, Renjith Mohan, Rao R Bhavani.

Design and Validation of a low cost wearable assistive device for carrying bulk load.

International conference on Advances in Materials & Manufacture Applications (IConAMMA).

3. Sasi Deepu, Rajendran S Vishnu, Harish Mohan T, Rao R Bhavani. An Experimental Study of Force involved in Manual Rebar Bending Process. International conference on Advances in Materials & Manufacture Applications (IConAMMA).

4. Dhivin Davis, James Jose, Rao R Bhavani. Bilateral Tel-haptic Interface for controlling a Robotic manipulator. International Conference On Intelligent Computing, Instrumentation And Control Technologies, ICICICT 2017.

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5. Raj Mohan, Vipin Raj C, Aswathy P, Rao R Bhavani. UAV Based Security System for Prevention of Harassment against Woman. International Conference On Intelligent Computing, Instrumentation And Control Technologies, ICICICT 2017.

6. Abel Varghese David, Harish T Mohan, Rao R Bhavani. Design of a Cart Driven Cart-Rail Robot for Farm Automation. International Conference On Intelligent Computing, Instrumentation And Control Technologies, ICICICT 2017.

7. Anand G, Rahul E S, Rao R Bhavani. A Sensor Framework for Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Robot Work-Cell. International Conference On Intelligent Computing, Instrumentation And Control Technologies, ICICICT 2017.

8. Milan Michael, Rahul E S, Rao R Bhavani. Design and Validation a 3-Wire Demonstration Device for Programming Industrial Manipulator. International Conference On Intelligent Computing, Instrumentation And Control Technologies, ICICICT 2017

international conference proceedings: published 1. Rahul Krishnan, Rajendran S Vishnu, Harish Mohan T, Rao R Bhavani. Design and Fabrication of a Low-Cost Rice Transplanting Machine. Technological innovations in ICT for agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2017).

2. Rahul K, Rajendran S Vishnu, Rao R Bhavani. Low cost Mechanical Assistive Aid for Workers Carrying Head Loads. Technological innovations in ICT for agriculture and Rural Development (TIAR 2017).

3. Vasudev S Mallan, Syam Gopi, Alexander Muir, Rao R Bhavani. Comparative empirical usability assessment of two HRI input devices for a mobile robot. 4th International Conference on Signal Processing, Computing and Control (ISPCC 2017).

4. N. Amritha, J. Jose, E. S. Rahul and R. R. Bhavani. A tweezer haptic interface for training surface mount device assembly. 2017 IEEE International Symposium on Haptic, Audio and Visual Environments and Games (HAVE), Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, 2017, pp. 1-6.

5. H. T. Mohan et al., Transforming urban waste into construction blocks for a sanitation infrastructure: A step towards addressing rural open defecation. 2017 IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference (GHTC), San Jose, CA, 2017, pp. 1-9 6. B. M. Menon, P. Aswathi, S. Deepu and R. R. Bhavani. Identification and evaluation of performance parameters for RE-BAR bending training simulator. 2017 8th International Conference on Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT), Delhi, India, 2017, pp. 1-7.

7. T. Narayanan, R. S. Vishnu, R. R. Bhavani and V. Vashista. A cable driven parallel robot for coconut farm. 2017 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Udupi, 2017, pp. 864-870.

8. A. S. Kumar, G. Manikutty, R. R. Bhavani and M. S. Couceiro. Search and rescue operations using robotic darwinian particle swarm optimization. 2017 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Udupi, 2017, pp. 1839-1843.

9. B. V. Pradeep, E. S. Rahul and R. R. Bhavani. Follow me robot using bluetooth-based position estimation. 2017 International Conference on Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), Udupi, 2017, pp. 584-589.

10. B. N. Sree, C. V. Raj and R. Madhavan. Obstacle avoidance for UAVs used in road accident monitoring. 2017 1st International Conference on Electronics, Materials Engineering and NanoTechnology (IEMENTech), Kolkata, 2017, pp. 1-6.

11. Ajithkumar, N., Aswathi, P., & Bhavani, R. R. (2017, April). Identification of an effective learning approach to landmine detection. In Electronics, Materials Engineering and Nano-

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Technology (IEMENTech), 2017 1st International Conference on (pp. 1-5). IEEE. 12. Gopi, S., Muir, A., & Bhavani, R. R. (2017, April). Naturalistic gestures based Human Robot Interaction on a UGV for outdoor use. In Electronics, Materials Engineering and Nano-Technology (IEMENTech), 2017 1st International Conference on (pp. 1-6). IEEE. 13. C. V. Raj, B. N. Sree and R. Madhavan. Vision based accident vehicle identification and scene investigation. 2017 IEEE Region 10 Symposium (TENSYMP), Cochin, 2017, pp. 1-5.

14. Goris, L. M., Harish, M. T., & Bhavani, R. R. (2017, July). A system design for solid waste management: A case study of an implementation in Kerala. In IEEE Region 10 Symposium (TENSYMP), 2017 (pp. 1-5). IEEE. 15. Sachith, K. P., Gopal, A., Muir, A., & Bhavani, R. R. (2017, September). Contextualizing ICT Based Vocational Education for Rural Communities: Addressing Ethnographic Issues and Assessing Design Principles. In IFIP Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 3-12). Springer, Cham.

16. Ananthakrishnan, U. S., Akshay, N., Manikutty, G., & Bhavani, R. R. (2017). Control of Quadrotors Using Neural Networks for Precise Landing Maneuvers. In Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Computations in Engineering Systems(pp. 103-113). Springer, Singapore.

17. Balu M Menon, Deepu D S, Harish Mohan T, Unnikrishnan R, Gayathri Manikutty, Marco Sangriorio, Shanker, Vishnu Prathap, Nishok S, Mahima Menon, Rao R Bhavani. Virtual Re-bar Bending Training Environment with Haptic Feedback. Advances in Robotics (AIR 2017).

18. Rahul Ravindran, James Jose, Harish Mohan, Rao R Bhavani. Design on a novel Three-finger haptic grasping system: Extending a single point to a Tripod grasp. Advances in Robotics (AIR 2017).

19. Menon, B. M., Unnikrishnan, R., Muir, A., & Bhavani, R. R. (2017, April). Serious game on recognizing categories of waste, to support a zero waste recycling program. In Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH), 2017 IEEE 5th International Conference on (pp. 1-8). IEEE. 20. Jose, J., Unnikrishnan, R., Marshall, D., & Bhavani, R. R. (2016, December). Haptics enhanced multi-tool virtual interfaces for training carpentry skills. In Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Applications (RAHA), 2016 International Conference on(pp. 1-6). IEEE. 21. Arjun, R. N., Soumya, S. J., Vishnu, R. S., & Bhavani, R. R. (2016, December). Semi automatic rubber tree tapping machine. In Robotics and Automation for Humanitarian Applications (RAHA), 2016 International Conference on (pp. 1-5). IEEE. 22. Soumya, S. J., Vishnu, R. S., Arjun, R. N., & Bhavani, R. R. (2016, December). Design and testing of a semi automatic rubber tree tapping machine (SART). In Humanitarian Technology Conference (R10-HTC), 2016 IEEE Region 10(pp. 1-4). IEEE. 23. Babu, Sooraj K., Marcia L. McLain, Kamal Bijlani, R. Jayakrishnan, and Rao R. Bhavani.

Collaborative Game Based Learning of Post-Disaster Management: Serious Game on Incident Management Frameworks for Post Disaster Management. Technology for Education (T4E), 2016 IEEE Eighth International Conference on,80-87. IEEE, 2016.

24. Jose, J., & Bhavani, R. R. (2016, November). Bimanual Haptic Simulator for Training Hand Palpation and Lumbar Puncture. In International AsiaHaptics conference (pp. 345-351). Springer, Singapore.

25. K Gokulnath, James Jose, Rao R Bhavani. Human-In-The-Loop Industrial Robot Control by 3DOF Haptic Device. International Conference on Advancements in Automation Robotics and Sensing (ICAARS), June 2016, India.

26. Maya Menon, GaneshaUdupa, GJ Nair, Rao R. Bhavani. Localization and Mapping Using Statistical Image Processing Methods. International Conference on Advancements in Automation Robotics and Sensing (ICAARS), June 2016, India.

27. Unnikrishnan R, Amritha N, Alexander Muir, Bhavani Rao. Elephants and Nested Loops: How to Introduce Computing to Youth in Rural India. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference

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on Interaction Design and Children. ACM, 2016.

28. Amritha, N., Menon M. Mahima, K. Namitha, R. Unnikrishnan, Mohan T. Harish, MD Sankaran Ravi, and Rao R. Bhavani. Design and development of balance training platform and games for people with balance impairments. Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), 2016 International Conference on, 960-966. IEEE, 2016.

29. Aswathi, Natarajan Amritha, K. Namitha, Nagarajan Akshay, Menon M. Balu and Rao R. Bhavani. Bridging the Skill Gap using Vocational Training Simulators: Validating Skill Assessment Metrics. Advances in Computing, Communications and Informatics (ICACCI), 2016 International Conference on, 645-651. IEEE, 2016.

30. George, Amal K., M. L. McLain, Kamal Bijlani, R. Jayakrishnan, and Rao R. Bhavani. A Novel Approach for Training Crane Operators: Serious Game on Crane Simulator. Technology for Education (T4E), 2016 IEEE Eighth International Conference on, 116-119. IEEE, 2016.

31. Parvathy K.R., McLain M.L., Bijlani K., Jayakrishnan R., Bhavani R.R. Augmented Reality Simulation to Visualize Global Warming and Its Consequences. Emerging Research in Computing, Information, Communication and Applications. Springer India, 2016. 69-78.

32. Archana U.V., Rajeshwaran A., McLain M.L., Bijlani K., Rao B., Jayakrishnan R. Game Based Learning to Reduce Carbon Foot Print. Emerging Research in Computing, Information, Communication and Applications. Springer India, 2016. 69-78.

33. Meera P., McLain M., Bijlani K., Jayakrishnan R., Rao B.R. Serious Game on Flood Risk Management. Emerging Research in Computing, Information, Communication and Applications.

Springer India, 2016. 69-78.

34. Sreelakshmi, R., M. L. McLain, Abhishek Rajeshwaran, Bhavani Rao, R. Jayakrishnan, and Kamal Bijlani. Gamification to Enhance Learning Using Gagne’s Learning Model. Computing, Communication and Networking Technologies (ICCCNT), 2015 6th International Conference on, pp. 1-6.

IEEE, 2015.

35. Christopher Coley, Srividya Sheshadri, Sriram Devanathan, Rao R. Bhavani. Ensuring training-transfer and personal performance after TVET: A strategy within the rural, Indian context for post-training engagement of TVET students for long-term success. International Conference on Emerging Trends in TVET: Vision 2025, February18-20, 2015.

36. Srividya Sheshadri, Christopher Coley, Sheeja Jagadeesh, Sreeram Kongeseri, Sriram Devanathan, Rao. R. Bhavani. Community Centric Vocational Education: A Strategy for Implementation of Computerized TVET Delivery in Rural India. International Conference on Emerging Trends in TVET: Vision 2025, February18-20, 2015.

37. Srividya Sheshadri, Christopher Coley, Rao R. Bhavani. Training India’s first female toilet builders: An argument for improving sanitation through women empowerment and social inclusion. International Conference on Sustainable Development (ICSD) 2015, September 23–24, 2015, Columbia University, New York City.

38. Jose, James, Nagarajan Akshay, and Rao R. Bhavani. Learning Elementary Physics though Haptic Simulations. Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Interdisciplinary Advances in Applied Computing. ACM, 2014.

39. Ranjith, Nagarajan Akshay, R. Unnikrishnan, Rao R. Bhavani. Do It Yourself Educational Kits for Vocational Education and Training. Proceedings of the 2014 International Conference on Interdisciplinary Advances in Applied Computing, p. 40. ACM, 2014.

40. James Jose, R Unnikrishnan, Delmar Marshall, Rao R. Bhavani. Haptic Simulations for Training Plumbing Skills. Haptic Audio and Visual Environments and Games (HAVE), 2014 IEEE International Symposium on, pp. 65-70, 2014

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41. Akshay, Nagarajan, Sasi Deepu, E. S. Rahul, R. Ranjith, James Jose, R. Unnikrishnan, and Rao R. Bhavani. Design and Evaluation of a Haptic Simulator for Vocational Skill Training and Assessment. Industrial Electronics Society, IECON 2013-39th Annual Conference of the IEEE, 6108-6113.

IEEE, 2013.

42. James Jose, Sanker Ramesh, Nagarajan Akshay, Rao R. Bhavani. TryStrokes: Learning on a Digital Canvas to Paint in the Real world. Global Humanitarian Technology Conference: South Asia Satellite (GHTC-SAS) 2013 IEEE, pp. 68-73, 2013.

43. Unnikrishnan, Karen Moawad, Rao R. Bhavani. A Physiotherapy toolkit using video games and motion tracking technologies. Global Humanitarian Technology Conference: South Asia Satellite (GHTC-SAS), 2013 IEEE. IEEE, 2013.

44. Margaret Minsky, Nagarajan Akshay, Natarajan Amritha, Suresh Anila, Anjali C. Nair, Ajana Gopalan, Rao R. Bhavani. Soft Circuits for Livelihood and Education in India. FabLearn 2013, USA, 2013.

45. Akshay, Nagarajan, Sasi Deepu, and Rao R. Bhavani. Augmented Vocational tools using real time audiovisual feedback for psychomotor skill training. Technology Enhanced Education (ICTEE), 2012 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1-4.IEEE, 2012.

46. Akshay, Nagarajan, Kongeseri Sreeram, Aneesh Anand, Ranga Venkataraman, and Rao R. Bhavani. MoVE: Mobile Vocational Education for rural India. Technology Enhanced Education (ICTEE), 2012 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1-5.IEEE, 2012.

47. Joshua Freeman, Akshay Nagarajan, Mithula Parangan, Dhanush Kumar, Shyam Diwakar, Krishnashree Achuthan. Remote triggered photovoltaic solar cell lab: Effective implementation strategies for Virtual Labs. Technology Enhanced Education (ICTEE), 2012 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 1-7.IEEE, 2012.

48. Bhavani, B., Srividya Sheshadri, and R. Unnikrishnan. Vocational education technology: rural India. Proceedings of the 1st Amrita ACM-W Celebration on Women in Computing in India. ACM, 2010.

49. Bhavani, B., Kumar Rajamani, Kamal Bijlani, Krishnashree Achuthan, N. Sreedha, V. Nithyanandan, J. Rahul, and Srividya Sheshadri. Virtual media enhanced vocational education curriculum. Computer Research and Development, 2010 Second International Conference on, pp.

280-284. IEEE, 2010.

50. Venkittarayan, C., V. Madan Gopal, Rao Kartikkumar, B. S. Nitin, Nitin Madan, Kumar Rajamani, Krishnashree Achyutan, and Bhavani Bijlani. Virtual soldering environment using touch and gesture for engineering labs education. Students’ Technology Symposium (TechSym), 2010 IEEE, pp.

206-210. IEEE, 2010.

51. Gupta, Nishant, K. Yogeshwara, RN Vinay Kumar, Rakesh Singh Bisht, Yaswanth Ginnela, Kumar Rajamani, Kamal Bijlani, Krishnashree Achuthan, and Bhavani Bijlani. Virtual fabric paint environment using touch and gesture for vocational training. Haptic Audio visual Environments and Games, 2009. HAVE 2009. IEEE International Workshop on, pp. 87-92. IEEE, 2009.

52. Bijlani Kamal, Chitra Pai, and Bhavani Bijlani. E-Learning in Social Applications. G. Siemens & C. Fulford (Eds.), Proceedings of EdMedia: World Conference on Educational Media and Technology 2009, 145-150. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE).

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AMMACHI Labs & CWEGE Team Members in the Field

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AMMACHI Labs & CWEGE Team Members at our Office Headquarters

AMMACHI Labs & The Center for Women’s Empowerment & Gender Equality Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Amritapuri Kollam, Kerala, India Office: +91 476 2804496 ammachilabs.org Follow Us: facebook.com/ammachi.labs twitter.com/ammachilabs