Applause: Literacy to poultry, bus service to cleaning villages

Nine organisations — among them biggies like Tata Consultancy Services and Tata Motors, and also the Water Supply & Sanitation Department of the Maharashtra government — have been selected for the gold trophy. Five others have been awarded the silver trophy.

The winners will be presented citations and trophies at a function in the third week of December.

The award, now in its second year, seeks to reward organisations — whether in the government, corporate, or development sector — which, through the implementation of unique ideas or processes, have been able to benefit a large number of people at the grassroots.

The winners were picked from more than 400 applications, which were put through a three-stage evaluation process. There were 20 organisations in the final short-list, from which 14 winners were selected.

The selection panel was headed by eminent scientist M G K Menon, and included academicians, technologists, consultants, and administrators.

The winners of the Gold trophies are:

• Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation, Bangalore: From a loss-making organisation, KSRTC turned around into a highly-efficient and profit-making enterprise through innovative use of state-of-the-art technology.

• Water Supply & Sanitation Department, Government of Maharashtra, along with participating panchayats: For initiating a self-help cleanliness drive.

• Tata Consultancy Services Ltd: For running a highly-successful computer-based adult literacy programme in multiple languages.

• Multi-Commodity Exchange of India (MCX): For pioneering advanced methods of commodity trading in the country and ensuring wide dispersion of information and transparency of prices among all stakeholders via the Internet, right from village-level and upwards.

• Keggfarms Pvt Ltd: For developing genetically-bred high-yielding village-specific poultry birds able to withstand and thrive under harsh conditions in rural India.

• MIDAS Communications Technologies: For providing cost-effective simultaneous voice and broadband data telecommunication products for rural India. The company was incubated at IIT, Chennai.

• Tata Motors: For developing Tata Ace, a safer, environment-friendly vehicle through indigenous design.

• Genpact: For having the lowest attrition level in the BPO sector and providing a chance to its fresh-from-school employees to obtain graduate degrees in their first three years of work at the company.

• L V Prasad Eye Institute, Hyderabad: For providing community eye health-care facilities to people in remote as well as urban areas by setting up Vision Centres and employing Vision Guardians at local level.

The winners of the silver trophies are:

• Larsen & Toubro Ltd: For innovative use of prefab metal scaffolding at construction sites.

• Mahindra & Mahindra: For becoming one of the lowest cost R&D units through a number of innovations, like the substitution of field trials by laboratory processes.

• Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Ltd: For using high-capacity tankers into use to save on trips and implementing an IT process that enables petrol pumps and outlets to place orders automatically as stocks go down.

• Mind Tree Consulting Ltd: For advances in Bluetooth technology and applications that put the company among the top three global players in the field.

• Tripura Forest Development & Plantation Corp Ltd: For introducing rubber plantation and crop management practices in tribal areas and marketing the communities’ rubber-based products, enabling them to earn higher and even move into permanent settlements.