Aksharit: The Hindi answer to Scrabble


MadRat Games, makers of the first Hindi word game, Aksharit

Word games have captivated millions across the globe. English has numerous such games and the most popular of them, Scrabble has been made in more than 30 languages. But despite of being the 3rd most spoken language, Hindi does not have any word games.

Rajat Dhariwal, an IIT Bombay and Carnegie Melon alumnus, always had a proclivity towards teaching and was enthusiastic about education. After having worked for a few MNC’s, he realized where his heart was and had an impulse to make a mark in the education field. Along with Manuj and Madhumita, Rajat started researching and trying to find a reason as to why this gap exists. English has just 26 alphabets while Hindi has about 600 characters and this had proved to be the biggest deterrent to the existence of word games in Hindi.

Manuj, a design graduate from IIT Guwahti played an intrinsic role in ideating the board game. Rajat and Madhumati, both holding degrees in Computer Science paved the way for taking the board game to the next step. The board game is being used in more than 300 schools for imparting the necessary language skills to students.

Rajat and Manuj Dhariwal, Madhumita Halder, Saurabh Mehta

The development of the physical game as well as the digital went on parallel but the breakthroughs made while designing the board game resolved a lot of issues that existed. Nokia had recently come up with its phone N8 and it wanted 10 unique applications for the Indian market. This is when the digital Aksharit was revealed. After Nokia, came in Intel and the Chrome web store.

The venture, Madrat Games is bootstrapped with an initial investment of Rs 30 lakhs and the company soon broke even and generates a close to 100 lakhs in revenues now. MadRat has other games on similar lines and also have a math game in the pipeline which is set for release in the next quarter.

Madrat has come a long way since its 5 years of existence and has made many proud. More about them here and the beautiful video at the beginning of the site can be found on Youtube here.

Jubin Mehta

Jubin Mehta
