Tech's the way to help intellectually challenged

Bengaluru: Economic stability works wonders for any individual. Sadly, in a country where getting a job and that stability continues to be a struggle, no one seems to care about the intellectually disabled. But Bengaluru-based AMBA is trying to fill that gap and has been working towards empowering these disabled people.

The social enterprise, which started in 2004, has developed an ecosystem of learning and earning which is adaptive, visual and functional to match the acumen of adults with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities.

"It is a disability of the mind with delayed developments which does not allow them to go through formal education at any level. Their lack of social skills limits them from working in mainstream companies. We collaborate with special institutions across the country and help them evolve into hubs of learning and earning. We use their infrastructure, administration and trainers to keep overheads to a minimum," said the founder, Sugandha Sukrutaraj, who was awarded the Ashoka Fellowship in 2007 for developing AMBA 'Learn and Earn' Concept using information technology. Her journey since then has not just been of learning but also of recognition. Last year, AMBA was adjudged the best NGO in the state.

"Our foundation works towards creating a supportive social space for this population and also helps various organisations working in this field to adopt our training module and become independent spoke centres," she said.

AMBA Core Centre or The Hub interfaces with various industries to get data entry jobs and helps spoke centres too to get such contracts. "For an intellectually disabled person, being employable is life-changing and economically empowering," she said.

AMBA's Hub and Spoke model spreads this learning and earning capability to organisations working with intellectually challenged adults across the country. The programme will soon be taken across the world, she said.

"The intellectually disabled employees are trained to do the related data entry offline and online, keeping the service level agreement set by the company. The AMBA team handles the gaps to ensure the end-to-end process is delivered within the timelines," she said.  

The AMBA Core Centre in Bengaluru , which is the hub, enables ACPCs with training and business. The spokes are the ACPCs across the country. "With data entry going obsolete worldwide, we have resourced and completed pilots for ECLAT, Reliance (in the automated phase through their vendor in Nagpur) and Pathpartner Face mapping (artificial intelligence) for prevention of accidents of public transport in the USA. Our pilot includes artificial intelligence-face recognition work which would go live in April," she said proudly.

The foundation has shared its concept at no cost with over 399 ACPCs in 25 states which are in different stages of training and their efficiency is tracked by monitoring staff from AMBA Core Centre. "We have impacted nearly 10,500 or more families. Our target is to reach 1,500 ACPCs by 2025, with 100% employability achieved by 2030," she summed up.