Time Lists This Indian as 1 of 10 Millennials Changing the World

Umesh Sachdev is a 30-year-old technologist from Chennai and the only Indian to make the list.

Umesh Sachdev. (Photo Courtesy: The News Minute)

At just 30, Umesh Sachdev, a Chennai-based technologist, is the only Indian to find a place in Time Magazine’s list of “10 millennials who are changing the world”.

Umesh is the CEO and co-founder of Uniphore, a startup that produces software that lets people access digital services by speaking in their native languages. Umesh says that his journey to innovation began in 2008, working with Uniphore co-founder and COO Ravi Saraogi, at the Incubation Centre in IIT Madras.

This idea came to us when we realised that 70 percent of people, that is 700 million people, live in smaller towns and villages. This is the population which is largely disconnected from the digital revolution. They are disconnected, largely because most of these people are not English literate.

Umesh

When their journey began, the mobile phone had begun to penetrate a majority of households, and this technology became the focus of their innovation strategies, he says.

So the idea was to use mobile phones as a communication channel and vernacular language as the medium of communication and bridge the digital divide.

Umesh

Umesh says it wasn’t an easy task. The first edition of their ideas depended on interfacing with people through a call centre, but this did not seem practical for the large numbers they sought to reach. And so, they decided to emulate humans in the call centre through technology. “Technology should have speech recognition in Indian languages, then search online and the results should be made available in the local language,” he explains.

They began with 16 major local languages in India but realised that dialects also matter significantly. Hence, they expanded to include more than 150 dialects and 70 global languages into the system. Today, their solutions have more than 500 million users.

Technology has spread even to the smallest villages. (Photo: iStockphoto)

The most difficult part of the new venture, says Umesh, was the sheer newness of it.

We were doing something cutting edge, something new. We were creating an intellectual property which did not exist anywhere in the world. It was hard to build it.

Umesh

But the challenge didn’t end with merely creating a new technology solution. Marketing was just as large a challenge. Umesh’s product was so new that people have not heard about it. They had to invest in educating their customers, marketing and branding.

We have worked with Jan Dhan Yojana. People in villages are far from their banks and cannot transact online either. So we told them to dial a number and say what they want. So, a housewife from Hyderabad calls and says, ‘I want to transfer Rs 500 to a friend,’ and the transaction gets done.

Umesh

Everyone has a mobile these days, it helps in communicating better. (Photo: iStockphoto)

The company is working with farmers in Tamil Nadu, who can “call up to ask ‘mandi’ prices, weather conditions, and any questions on crops,” he says.

Uniphore’s software solutions offer benefits not only to rural customers but urban ones as well. “Even in call centres, during a conversation, if executives are not able to find the problem, they can use the software to give better suggestions,” he says.

Umesh is honoured by his inclusion in the Time Magazine list, but is unwilling to simply sit back and enjoy such laurels.

It’s always humbling, I’m the only technologist. It’s great but we have learnt in the last eight years that these are good milestones to stop and celebrate, but the next day we need to go back and continue our work.  That’s why we are here.

Umesh