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The
GPower, or Girl Power, app developed by Accenture Labs and the
charity Child in Need Institute (CINI), has been used to track
more than 6,000 families in 20 villages in West Bengal.
The application sets out a series of questions on health,
nutrition, protection and education to determine the
vulnerability of the respondent.
"The technology helps us identify the most vulnerable of the
girls in minutes," CINI's assistant director Indrani
Bhattacharya told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
"So we can plan our intervention and bring immediate solutions
to prevent the occurrence (of trafficking, child marriage and
child labor), rather than trying to do something after the
fact."
The questionnaire take about 30 minutes to complete and the
analysis takes minutes. Based on the information collected, a
community worker decides whether girls are candidates for
government welfare schemes, counseling or vocational training,
Bhattacharya said.
West Bengal is both a source and a transit state for women and
children trafficked into the sex trade. The state accounted for
about a fifth of India's 5,466 cases of human trafficking
reported in 2014, according to official data.
Many of the victims are from rural areas in the state or from
neighboring Bangladesh, lured by the promise of good jobs or
marriage. Instead, they end up sold into prostitution in cities
such as Mumbai and New Delhi.
GPower is particularly suited for rural India, where mobile
connectivity is patchy and electricity supply is irregular, said
Sanjay Podder, managing director at Accenture Labs in Bengaluru.
"It can easily be scaled up to include other parameters or to
address other social problems in the country," he said.
India is the world's second-biggest market for mobile phones,
with more than 1 billion users. Mobile applications for services
ranging from weather reports to commodity prices and health
services are gaining popularity among rural users.
"The problem in India is one of scale - there is only so much
that an NGO can do in terms of reach," Podder said.
"To address social problems, technology is not just nice to
have, it is necessary," he said.
(Reporting by Rina Chandran, Editing by Katie Nguyen.; Please
credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of
Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's rights,
trafficking, corruption and climate change. Visit news.trust.org
to see more stories.)
[© 2016 Thomson Reuters. All rights
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