Shashank Garg, CEO
Shashank Garg is the Founder-CEO of HANDSREL.
He has over 30 years of industry experience in product development and R&D management, with extensive experience in development of mobile computing products.
Prior to starting HANDSREL, Shashank was a co-founder and Vice President of the Mobile Computing Group at Encore Software Limited, Bangalore where he was the chief architect of a range of mobile devices like the Simputer and the Mobilis. He was a co-inventor of the Simputer, a low-cost, mobile computing device that was developed with the specific goal of applying appropriate technologies for bridging the Digital Divide in developing countries. The Simputer was perhaps the first mobile device of its kind which incorporated a smart-card reader as one of its defining features for applications in the Social Sector. The smart-card remains an important feature of the Mobilis, the next generation of mobile devices that Shashank developed at Encore.
He, along with the other co-inventors of the Simputer, was awarded the First Dewang Mehta Award for Innovation in Information Technology in April 2002 by the Government of India.
Shashank is an alumnus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India from where he has obtained both his Bachelor and Master of Engineering degrees. He is also an alumnus of Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani from where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree. He is registered for a PhD at BITS Pilani and is completing his thesis.
Shashank spent a year at Stanford University as a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow in Stanford University’s Digital Vision Program on Social Entrepreneurship during the year 2006-2007, working on a mobile data collection system for Disease Surveillance. He was financially supported through a scholarship from Motorola, USA.
On his return from a sabbatical at Stanford, Shashank continued his engineering management duties at Encore but also showed keen interest in the field of Social Entrepreneurship through a new initiative called Handhelds for Health with a focus on Public Health and Disease Surveillance. Handhelds for Health has recently morphed into Handheld Solutions & Research Labs (HANDSREL) and is now a full time activity for Shashank and his small team of developers.
He is an active founder-member of the OpenXdata Consortium, an open-source development initiative started at the Centre for International Health, University of Bergen, Norway.