Inclusive Employment through Assistance

Across the world only 15% of the Persons with Disabilities have access to Assistive Aids, mainly because these devices are not affordable as more than 90% of the PwDs come from Low Income households. The situation leads to higher dependence of PwDs on their families and well wishers thereby limiting their education & employment outreach. 

At TorchIt, we design effective & affordable solutions for Persons with Disabilities in order to provide them the ecosystem and independence they need to lead empowered lives. Our devices are assembled & distributed in partnership with PwDs thereby creating an ecosystem to generate employment for the beneficiary community as well.  

World over there are more than a billion suffering from some form disabilities being visual, hearing or locomotive impairment which means almost 16% of our population are under performing and leading dependent lives due to lack of affordable assistive aids being available for them.

So, Differently ables friends across the globe face multiple problems in their daily lives ranging from day to day indoor and outdoor travel, confident communication, to getting fair employment opportunities and even feeling left out in the society. Additionally, these billion people feeling left out and not able to join the workforce due to mobility & confidence issues causes huge loss of human capital.

TorchIt is a social enterprise focused towards enabling the empowering of the Peoples with Disabilities through developing & distributing impactful, utilitarian & affordable assistive devices to the beneficiaries across the world. The aim of this venture is to develop an Efficient and Economical Device for Persons with Disabilities, so they can go about their lives with more confidence and Independent.

TorchIt is a team of dedicated and passionate individuals majorly focused towards understanding the needs of the disability community and then developing products centred around their needs and thereby creating impactful differential in the lives of the beneficiaries through affordable & utilitarian assistive device

TorchIt had started its journey with providing accurate navigation aid for the blind which helps them walk independently in any kind of setup with complete ease. We have more than 25,000 users across the world with major focus in developing countries being India & Africa. Our other devices are also focused towards making Education inclusive for the visually, hearing & locomotive impaired communities through different utilitarian solutions. 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/16kxL3ofucGsS3IAerCS5EeTXi_v2Qgvj/view  

Our Saarthi, Assistive Mobility aid for Visually Impaired; provides "99.7% Obstacle Detection Accuracy in all possible setups. Saarthi is ergonomically designed, battery efficient device that can be used standalone or can be attached to any white cane. Video Link

eBraille which is Assistive device for empowering visually impaired people to access and create any content through the on-device file management system, wireless keyboard to support mobile integration to perform functions and typing through Bluetooth enabled capabilities and the feature to convert any text to audio and have any audio file listened on the device. 

VOIS - Smart gloves for the people suffering from hearing impairment, it provides them with the capability to interact with anyone through gesture-based communication powered by the audio output on a smartwatch and also to understand what the other person is communicating through TTS Text are available on the watch screen. Video Link

'Handicare' for People suffering from lower limb disability. It is an Innovative mechanically operated mobility aid, which allows the user to move with complete ease and comfort without having any push from any body part. Handicare is a life-changing device for specially-abled people for indoor mobility. (Video Link)

Our new product, 'Smart Crutches', are modern and multi-terrain utility crutches, one of its kind designed to enhance the mobility of the users by enhanced stability, grip and less fatigue while walking and designed for all-terrain performance and tested at AIIMS Delhi, Military Hospital Kirkee, International Committee for the Red Cross. (Video Link)

Our essence of Innovation is drawn from designing effective but affordable assistive aid as we believe if the solution is not affordable it lacks the ability to create the impact considering 90% of PwDs are from Low income households therefore the solution to reach the maximum number of beneficiaries has to be affordable. The other innovative approach that we have tried to follow is participative building & scaling i.e. all our products are designed, developed and distributed in participation from PwDs thereby making utilitarian products by PwDs and for the PwDs.

Our theory of change is Inclusive & utilitarian Tech at affordable pricing for maximum impact and empowerment. 

We currently have more than 25,000 users with an intent to capture another 40,000 by end of next year and a million more by the end of next 5 years

The goal for the next year is to have more awareness & engagement campaigns across different states & countries to increase user participation & impact while the longer term objective remains to design & distribute more impactful yet affordable products for PwDs.

Our current short term barriers are user engagement generation while the long term barriers shall be coming up with innovative & affordable solutions to capture assistance accessibility in different domains of lives of PwDs.

We intend to overcome our barriers with participation from the community and the grit that we have shown for the cause for the last 4 years.

Co-founders: 2

Full-time employees (excld. co-founders): 15

Advisors & Investors:

Dr. Bhushan Punani, ES; Blind Peoples Association

Dr. Sonal Chauhan, Director, Investor

Mr. Ashish Chauhan, CEO & MD, Bombay Stock Exchange

Mr. Abhinav Kapadia, CFO; PDPU & Director, IIC

Dr. Homiyaar Mobedji, CEO South Asia and Africa

Prof. Basker V. Mehta, President; National Association Blind India

Mr. Girish Bhambhani, Strategy head, Botch Bangalore

Our team is a blend of seasoned professionals and young talent both immensely connected to the cause and what creates a differentiating factor for our team is the great bonding & grit we display amongst ourselves and as an organisation while enjoying great support in the form of engagement & feedback from the user community.

We have more than 100+ NGO partners across the world and more than 20 venture partners. Our partners include Blind Peoples Association, National Association for the Blinds, National Deaf Societies, Sight Savers, Facebook, ONGC, Tata Trust, Lockheed Martin, USAID, UK Govt. and many more.

Our NGO partners support us in user identification & distribution while our venture partners act as sponsors and funders for the cause.

Our business model is fairly simple engage with CSR & State partners to secure impact projects for distributing devices for the PwDs whilst also providing the devices for end users to be bought from their own pockets.

The value proposition we provide for the corporates & state is the essence of impact & building independence, empowerment & inclusion in the society whilst the end user get utilitarian and affordable assistive devices for making their lives independent and sustained.   

Financial sustainability is baked into our approach and conduct as we understand if we can't put food at the tables of our team we wouldn't be able to sustain the impact for our community. We operate at a thin operating margin of 25% which helps keep the team financially suatained and have the essence of affordability in our devices.