A technology team from Delhi inspired by Nirbhaya has won the $1 million Anu and Naveen Jain XPrize for Women’s Safety by developing a device that will send out alerts with location and summon help if a woman is threatened.
Delhi College of Engineering graduates Manik Mehta and Avinash Bansal, and Niharika Rajiv, whose Leaf Wearables team developed the pendant-like electronic device, SAFER Pro, received the prize at an awards ceremony at the UN in New York on Wednesday.
The prize was funded by Naveen Jain, the Indian American technology and space entrepreneur who founded the Moon Express, and his wife Anu.
A total of 85 teams from 18 countries around the world entered the competition announced two years ago and five teams were chosen as finalists and their devices were tested on Mumbai trains.
The other four finalists received prizes of $50,000 each from contributions by two other donors who each gave $100,000. One of the finalists was the Artemis team from Lausanne, Switzerland, led by Nicee Srivastava.
Mehta said that they were inspired by the tragedy of Nirbhaya, the student who was brutally gang raped in Delhi in 2012 and succumbed to her injuries. If even one woman was saved with their device, he said he would feel gratified. Naveen, whose company Moon Express plans to send spacecraft to the moon to commercially mine metals, said: “How can we go to the moon or Mars if half of us cannot walk outside in safety?”
We are proud to announce that @leafwearables is the winner of the $1 Million #WomensSafety @xprize sponsored by @Naveen_Jain_CEO and @ms_anujain. Learn more about the lifesaving technology here: https://t.co/yHxcAEA6Uk pic.twitter.com/OtwEwkrcVT
— XPRIZE (@xprize) June 7, 2018
He said that the idea behind the Xprizes was to crowd source innovation and spur people to find solutions to problems right away. Anu said: “Safety is a fundamental right. All women, regardless of our social and economic status, have felt unsafe.”
This was a problem around the world and in the US one in five women college students have been sexually assaulted, she said. Peter Diamandis, the executive chairman of XPrize said that unlike other awards, it was not given for something that was done years ago, but to find a solution to a current problem.
Bansal said the device, that’s shaped like a pendant, can alert the family and police about the exact location of the victim using GPS coordinates. It can also help navigate to the nearest hospital. Although it requires a SIM card, the device is not a phone and works independently through cell networks, he added.
Mehta said they were working with a manufacturer in India and another in China to mass-produce the SAFER Pro and were also in contact with cellular network operators in India and the US. It would be sold in India through Amazon and Flipkart, he added. One of the conditions for the prize was that the device should cost less than $40.
The other members of the Leaf Wearables team are Ayush Banka, Chiraag Kapil and Paras Batra. XPrize is known for the Google Prize competition it ran for robotic space explorer. It is now running competitions to find solutions to a variety of problems, from illiteracy and water scarcity to exploring oceans and harnessing artificial intelligence.
Arul Louis