Shivam Srivastava is currently a WiMAX systems engineer at Motorola, Inc, where he designs and deploys wireless networks for rural parts of South and Central America. Shivam hopes to combine his passions of engineering and learning to achieve his long term goal of making the quality of education available in India independent from the student’s economic background. He is the co-founder of EPR India, an organization that aims to empower and educate Indian citizens about appropriate responses to emergency situations. Shivam is also actively involved in a start-up social venture to empower Indian women with IT skills and a number of other non-profit organizations. He has received a number of distinctions including being named a StartingBloc Institute for Social Innovation Fellow and receiving the Clinton Stryker Distinguished Leadership Award. Shivam graduated in 2007 with a degree in Computer Engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago where he was also an Ed Kaplan Enterpreurship Scholar, and plans to join a JD/MBA program in the near future.
Ifran Alam is a well known to many who follow Social Ventures in India. As the founder of SammaaN, which organizes rickshaw pullers into small marketing and courier businesses, Irfan has won a number of awards including the World Bank Innovation award and the TED India Fellowship. He is also a fan of Dr. Prahalad [...]
The Indian School of Business has launched the iDiya Challenge, an idea competition for social ventures which is open to working professionals across India to participate in. The competition opened on July 23rd and will accept applications till Sep 19th. The winners of the competition will receive Rs. 1,00,000 and six teams will get a [...]
SKS Microfinance, India’s largest MFI is planning to raise over Rs. 1000 crores ($225m) through the sale of 16.8m equity shares, as reported by the Economic Times. Per the IPO prospectus, Sequoia, Sandstone Capital and Kismet Capital Advisors replace SKS founder Vikram Akula as the chief promoters. This follows a RBI directive requiring a minimum [...]
A number of immersion programs exist that attempt to make the youth aware about development challenges in India. Some examples include Grassroutes, Teach for India and Engineers for Social Impact (E4SI). As the application deadline for this year’s E4SI fellowship approaches (7 March, 2010), we asked some former fellows about their experience working for various social [...]
In an article in India Knowledge@Wharton, Abraham George, founder of The George Foundation, questions the effectiveness and validity of many so-called social entrepreneurs and writes about the myth of the BoP consumer. He starts with the common definition of social entrepreneurs as those who focus on the double bottom-line – profitability and the impact on society. However, [...]
A few weeks back the Aspen Institute India invited essays based on a simple prompt, Do you have ideas that could address some of India’s problems? Some of these ideas were presented a few weeks back at Aspen Institute Conference in Delhi. Fighting Corruption One of the highlights of the event was Mr. Shashi Mather, founder [...]
Teach for India (TFI) is a program that places young professionals and graduates within India’s low income schools for 2 years. A spin-off of the Teach for America program, TFI has a phenomenally successful first year in 2009. The first batch consisted of fellows from top colleges and corporate jobs in India and abroad. Applications [...]
The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship recently recognized three individuals with significant impact in India as Social Entrepreneurs of the year for 2009. This was the fifth annual addition of these awards and was held in collaboration with the UN Development Program and CII. The first winner of this award is Rajendra Joshi of Saath, who has been working since [...]
The StartingBloc Institute for Social Innovation educates, inspires and connects emerging leaders to create new solutions to global challenges. Through the program, StartingBloc unite social innovators across sectors to change the world in sustainable ways. You can read about about my StartingBloc experience from the Boston 2009 fellowship. There are three parts to the StartingBloc Fellowship: 1. Institute for Social [...]
IndiaKhelo is seeking to build a national measurement of kid’s performance in sports (similar to the centralized board exams), hold events across the country to unearth talent (like the national academic talent searches) and in general inspire a lot more people to take sports as seriously as classes.I recently caught up with Varun Gupta, one [...]
