Riding on India’s largest festival, Ganesh Chaturthi (the festival of India’s favorite elephant headed God) we built the world’s first ever idol ever made for the blind. An idol of god Ganesh. An idol called Sparsh Vinayak – The touch & feel elephant god.

An idol made with special tactile sensory aid (of nylon thread treated with special wax to exaggerate the sense of touch for the blind).

An idol was based on the insight that the blind have forever stayed devoid of experiencing their favorite God Ganesh. And the insight that the sighted have forever stayed devoid of the realization of what it is to be blind and not be able to enjoy everyday things like the visual of your favorite god.

It took over 30 days for one of Mumbai’s leading idol sculpture artist to finally give shape to the Sparsh Vinayak idol. A first of its kind material using nylon thread treated with wax was used to drape the idol giving it pronounced definition for the blind to touch, feel and visualize the idol or rather their favorite elephant god.

Finally, the Sparsh idol hosted inside a pandal (temporary pop-up temple installation) was up for display at one of Mumbai’s most popular malls leveraging the malls organic footfall of over .7 million during the course of the 11 festival days.

The campaign was only executed at one touch point but the thought behind the campaign left an everlasting impression on the audiences. The campaign was more than just an idol, but a message for humanity which the country needed to live on.

The campaign reached 7.5millon people out of which 5 million were devotees of Lord Ganesha. 86% of the devotees that visited the pandal were the sight gifted audience. The campaign created a large impression being the 3rd most trending topic on twitter with 32% engagements on social media and 28x earned media. With over 2,21,000 people pledging to donate their eyes SPARSH VINAYAK saw a surge of 689% breaking the stereotype for good.