Skoch awards

For nearly a decade now, the Skoch Consultancy Services has honored the extraordinary accomplishments enhancing inclusive growth and good governance. Skoch today enjoys the distinction of having instituted several of the oldest, most prestigious and comprehensive civilian awards in the field of governance, capacity building, empowerment, inclusive growth, citizen services delivery, technology, academics and change management. Skoch Awards identify greatest interventions that have benefitted humanity and deepened our understanding of India on a greater scale.

It was with this thought that we instituted the Skoch Challenger Awards in 2003, that salute people, projects and institutions that went the extra mile to make India a stronger nation. Skoch Challenger Awards – the highest independently instituted civilian honour – have been conferred; the mighty and the ordinary have shared this platform for their extraordinary achievements in contributing to the society. Covering the best of efforts in the area of digital, social and financial inclusion and other such softer issues, the Skoch Challenger Awards are coveted for their independence, primary research and a distinguished jury based approach.

The world is indeed getting smaller and more open – and nowhere is this exemplified better than in open-source technologies. An increasing number of institutions, corporates and even programmers are coming together, propelled by open-source movement, across the world. Open-source is being used as a platform to build reliable and mission critical applications. It is in recognition of this that Skoch instituted the Skoch The World is Open Awards and has till date studied over 200 projects as primary research and over 500 as secondary research of ICT projects across India. Skoch focuses on benefits accruing from use of technology and remains a technology neutral platform. The parameters for project evaluation include, effectiveness in delivering project objectives, innovation, open standards, relevance, scalability and flexibility.

In addition to the above corporations like Microsoft and Oracle have also relied on Skoch expertise successively as an independent assessment agency for e-governance projects. Skoch has studied and documented over 500 such projects and has in the process created one of the world’s largest online Knowledge Repository on Governance and other development areas.