Gram Vaani

We are a social technology company incubated out of IIT Delhi. We started in 2009 with the intent of reversing the flow of information, that is, to make it bottom-up instead of top-down. Using simple technologies and social context to design tools, we have been able to impact communities at large. In 2015, we got together with the Life Impacting Services team of OnMobile to form OnionDev. Our pioneering radio automation system now runs at 40+ community radio stations in India and 5 in Africa, enabling an aggregate population of 2.5 million people to create their own local media. In 2011, we built a radio-over-phone citizen journalism service that in now deployed in Jharkhand, Bihar, and MP in India, and in Afghanistan and Pakistan internationally, and has clocked more than 1.5 users and 6 million phone calls. We are now bringing together our footprint on radio-over-phone and community radio services across the country, to build a unified platform of social media for the bottom of the pyramid. We call this Mobile Vaani. Mobile Vaani is our answer to building a social media platform equivalent to Facebook/YouTube/Twitter for rural areas. Communities use Mobile Vaani to share updates about local village events, folk songs and cultural updates, feedback on government schemes, and discussions about topics of local importance. We are actively looking for non-profit and corporate partners interested to use the Mobile Vaani network for outreach into remote and rural areas in a measurable and robust manner.