Tech Matters: Using tech for positive social change

After visiting the Chennai operation of Worth Trust, Viji and I journeyed to Katpadi, the town where Worth Trust is headquartered. Around the town are quite a number of Worth Trust enterprises. One of the enterprises we stopped by made the hand-tricycles I saw all over the region. For a person without high functioning legs, a wheelchair is not that practical in the community. Instead, there were a lot of tricycles with the crank mounted where it can be turned by hand. Worth Trust makes and sells these accessible tricycles. Another part of the operations turns out to be the assembly arm of the famous Perkins Brailler: a manual Braille typewriter still in wide use. Viji stopped to chat with one of the women on the assembly line. Most of the employees of Worth Trust are people with disabilities. We met many of the employees, including deaf workers, blind workers and workers with physical disabilities. The guy pictured above is a blind machinist. I also got to try out a powered wheelc...

My first social enterprise visit in Chennai was to one of the offices of Worth Trust, our social enterprise partner in Tamil Nadu. Thanks to funding from the Lavelle Fund, we've been able to set up a scanning facility to produce books there. Worth Trust is a social enterprise with the goal of employing people with disabilities. It has a great symmetry: people with non-print disabilities are scanning in books for people with visual disabilities. The Times of India covered the story during my visit, Disabled in city help blind in US . The scanning setup is quite similar to ours in Palo Alto, of course. I'm always amazed at how small high-speed scanners are these days. You chop the book binding off and an entire book scan be scanned in five or ten minutes. We've been shipping books to Chennai, but that turns out to be hard. We'll expect to be sending some digital images of books from the U.S. for proofreading in the future. Plus, as we get more permissions from Ind...

Virginia and Kate, my wife and daughter, volunteered to come along with me on my one-week trip to South India. So, I extended it to two weeks and added a trip to Madurai as part of that. After visiting Aravind Eye Hospital and Aurolab, we started on our vacation time. South India is famous for its temples. People are quite religious, and have a great deal of pride in their religious heritage and temples. We especially appreciated getting the run-down on major deities and the great stories: it helped us understand what we were seeing as we toured the area. One of the largest and most famous temples is in Madurai: the Meenakshi Amman Temple. It has numerous spectacular towers. When we arrived, all but one of the largest towers were covered: they need regular painting. We watched as men passed wooden poles up the last tower, as they built scaffolding lashed together (picture above). After the frame is up, they cover the frame with what looks like thatching: so you have this gia...