TIC 2022 Winner From IIM B Builds SAATHIYA For Dyslexics

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The Tata Group is an Indian public multinational conglomerate manufacturer of automobiles, airplanes, and other products, headquartered in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The entity came back this year with its annual business case competition, the Tata Imagination Challenge 2022 inviting college students across India and Tata employees from anywhere in the world to share any idea that could make a difference. My name is Debayan Datta Chowdhury and I too decided to partake in this exploration of talent and raw ideas coming from the global community. The TIC 2022 team recognized my idea and I am never going to forget the journey that led me to the National Winner title.

Tata Imagination Challenge 2022 Format

Needless to say, the quality of the competition was excellent and everything went on smoothly. The structure of the competition was as follows:

• Round 1 - Tata Brand Assessment
• Round 2 - Gamified Assessment
• Round 3 - Video + 3 Questions Submission
• Idea Buddy Phase
• Popular Choice Awards
• Round 4 - Grand Finale

The aim was to push everyone to identify a problem, explore all possibilities they could think of, and share their solutions.

The Begining Of My TIC 2022 Journey

My Tata Imagination Challenge (TIC) journey began in August while I was having dinner with one of my friends Rishav in the IIM Bangalore mess hall. He told me that he was dyslexic, and the revelation left me perturbed and wanting to know more about how he was diagnosed. Rishav has always faced issues with reading/ writing at school, but he was very talented in arts and music. It was on the insistence of one of his mother's colleagues that they decided to get him checked for dyslexia. And after spending INR 40k and waiting for about 4 weeks, they found out that Rishav was dyslexic. Then he told me that this discovery lead him to change his entire method of studying. You’d be surprised to know that his study plans were much more tedious than any of ours. He had to write a single line 10 times to understand it, and this was just the beginning.

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The Rise of SAATHIYA For Diagnosing Dyslexia

As we continued our discussions, I found out that there is no accessible way a common person in India could get tested for dyslexia. The only reason Rishav got diagnosed was that he stays in Mumbai, where infra is comparatively easily available. And this will not be true for someone in, say, Silchar, a town in Assam (my hometown). 

This was my own Eureka moment. An idea sparked in my mind and I was driven to build an accessible digital solution to identify dyslexia, a problem that has been plaguing our country for years. To add to my determination to find a solution, one of my cousins also suffered from dyslexia and was exposed to a lot of humiliation throughout his life. I had decided early on that the digital platform, which I named SAATHIYA, would help bridge this gap between a child & a self-empowered life. 

Conducting Secondary Research was Paramount

I relied on conducting thorough secondary research to collect all the needed information and data. After my secondary research, I found that there are lots of apps to help teach dyslexic kids "after" they are identified, but there are no affordable and accessible platforms to help identify the illness in the first place. According to data, there are 10 crore Indians suffering from some kind of learning impairments, and the assessments can cost 19500-Rs. 35000, based on the number of tests conducted. Meaning, a majority of people cannot get a diagnosis of this basic but highly stigmatized mental disability due to the constraints of time, money & infrastructure. This showed a gap in the market as the existing mechanism to test for learning disabilities is lengthy, cumbersome & expensive. After recognizing the need for such a platform, I proceeded with new vigor. 

The Plan of Action

After my due diligence, I divided the structure of the app into 3 segments/ stages, which were as follows: 

1.   General Info & Mental Check-up (Questionnaires)
2.   Preliminary screening (Gamified Rounds)
3.   Final testing (Subjective Q&A)

The idea was that post the evaluation by a psychologist, users will be suggested to report to the nearest hospital for a detailed check-up. The flow of my business model was- to first leverage the B2B segment, and then move to B2C through sufficient word-of-mouth publicity. 

More About SAATHIYA

The aim of this app is to provide end-to-end service to customers. So I began by contacting multiple hospitals to have access to their clinical psychologists. Then moved on to testing the children in schools within a 1 km radius, which can be directed to that specific hospital, thus closing the loop. I believe that SAATHIYA presents a unique & viable business opportunity to provide digital solutions to problems that have been ignored in this country for too long. 

Winning the Tata Imagination Challenge 2022

TIC encourages participants to identify problems and present feasible solutions to the same, irrespective of the domain. I was ecstatic at presenting this solution in the final rounds of the Tata Imagination Challenge. And I am thankful to Tata Group for accepting & recognizing the potential of an idea to change lives. It was an experience of a lifetime, and I hope that this app will impact the lives of millions of people positively Three cheers to TIC’22! #BeUnstoppable

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