Access for All

Sachin Malhan has been an entrepreneur his entire life, or at least he has felt like one. In 2003, knowing that corporate law was not his cup of tea, he started his first venture, and then his second, and then his third. But, his latest venture is the one that brings us the greatest excitement!

In late 2008, Sachin co-founded Inclusive Planet (IP), an enterprise that creates innovative web and mobile based services specifically designed for the differently-abled.* Never one to look at the small picture, Sachin dreams of IP becoming the definitive global online community and marketplace for the differently-abled. His dreams stretch far beyond the boundaries of the Indian subcontinent!

Just take a second to imagine being differently-abled in India. Imagine being blind. Or in a wheelchair. Now, imagine crossing a Mumbai street – motorbikes rushing at you, a stray cow standing in the median, a puddle disguising a huge pothole, a bus charging through that puddle. Now you’ve got the picture of what Sachin and his IP co-founders were up against when they decided to launch this venture.

Worldwide, the differently-abled lack access – access to learning and entertainment, access to places, to people. Sachin and IP are setting out to change this.

Access to Learning and Entertainment

Their first foray into the space is Readable, a user-generated library of books accessible to the visually-impaired. The blind are automatically limited by what books are available in braille. For the blind, the internet has been a revolution. Everything, well, almost everything, on the internet is text-to-speech convertible. For this reason, the internet has quickly become the blind’s best friend. Readable harnesses the web for a positive good – by making accessible books and materials relevant to leisure as well as study.

Access to Places

Close on the heels of Readable are offerings that include Visitable, Matchable, and Thisability. Visitable is a community-driven (crowd-sourced) service that will index and rate urban locations and routes according to the level of their “accessibility,” a Burrp or Yelp for accessibility, if you may. If you want to go to a restaurant, you can check if the restaurant is accessible. If you want to go to the movies, the same holds true. The hope is that the differently-abled will WANT to participate in Visitable, they will WANT to build something like Visitable for their own community.

Access to People

We, as non-differently-abled individuals, often take for granted that we have friends, go out, get married, etc. Often, this doesn’t happen in the case of the differently-abled. They are often marginalized and forced to stay at home, which results in tremendous loneliness. In fact, the differently-abled are often referred to as “the invisible minority.” Matchable – a social network designed to connect the differently-abled – and Thisability – an assessment, training, and job platform for the differently-abled – seek to alter these social stereotypes and grant the differently-abled access to the most important resource of all – people.

Since all services can be accessed through one Inclusive Planet profile and all members are part of one social network/community united across applications, Inclusive Planet lives up to its name. It is not a random network. It is actually one community.

Imagine this, a 500,000-strong social community of differently-abled individuals. Together, they can campaign for change. If 1,000 people say a mall or restaurant is inaccessible and send a petition to the management, maybe change will occur. We are certainly rooting for Sachin and his Inclusive Planet team to revolutionize both access for the differently-abled and the way they are treated by society!

You can follow Sachin on Twitter at @inclusiveplanet.

* According to the UN, 10% of the world is disabled, 5.5% is hearing and visually impaired.