The Financial Express
New Delhi | November 30
What has the Nagaland government to do with innovation? A plenty, if you ask the very eminent people on the panel which decides EMPI-Indian Express Indian Innnovation Awards.
For their inaugural awards last year, they had picked the Nagaland government for a silver award for an extremely innovative and useful legislation that is slowly empowering the local tribes in the remotest parts of the state.
Through the Nagaland Communitisation of Public Institutions and Services Act 2002, the state government passed on the administration of health services, education and power distribution to the local communities. The move has resulted in a remarkable improvement in the efficiency of these services and has helped a great deal in bringing these local tribes into the political and administrative mainstream.
This is exactly the kind of organizational innovation that EMPI and The Indian Express seek to reward through their award initiative—by picking on people and organisations, both in the government and corporate sector, who are making a difference at the grassroots level through their unique ideas and business models.
The second edition of the awards would be given in the third week of December by former President APJ Abdul Kalam, with a formal announcement of the winners happening in the next couple of days. “When we talk of innovation, we generally tend to associate it with a new or improved product. But this award seeks to look at something different. We seek to reward an institutional innovation—implementation of an idea or a process that has been able to create a positive impact on a large group of people,” said Pankaj Saran, vice-president of EMPI Business School, and one of the key people behind this awards initiative.
Another of the awardees last year was the Narayana Hrudayalaya heart-care hospital in Bangalore, that pioneered a cheap health insurance scheme for farmers.
For a monthly premium of only five rupees, the farmers could get free medical benefits up to Rs 2 lakh per year. “This is another example of an innovative idea that has improved millions of lives. We must be able to celebrate such success stories and reward the people and organizations behind them,” Saran said.
Just in the second year, the impact of the awards is already beginning to show. EMPI has also brought out an award journal in which case studies of these success stories have been presented in detail which has brought global recognition to these “Surprisingly, some of these organisations themselves do not realize how important a work they are doing. They work away from media glare. In such a situation, it becomes all the more important that someone is able to showcase their good work that can inspire others as well. I hope these awards would achieve that purpose,” Saran said. For the inaugural awards last year, four organisations, including Narayana Hrudalaya, had got the gold trophy, while three others, including the Nagaland government, received silver trophies.
This year the awardee list may be longer with the panel receiving many more good quality applications than last year.
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