While much attention has been given to microfinance and its positive benefits when things are going well, a paper recently published by Serajul Hoque, graduate associate at the Department of Economics at Monash University in Australia, shows that such initiatives may actually help people be better off when economies stumble as well. From Microcapital.org: Published [...]

From Atanu Dey’s blog: The latest issue is on the stands. Click on the image to download (pdf) the current issue of Pragati. To get a preview of what’s in the issue, read the excerpts at the Pragati site. Prof Asher’s article on the Gujarat model is a must-read. “Its focus on development, empowerment of [...]

Venture Intelligence Blog highlighted a profile done in Business Today on Rural Innovations Network (RIN) — a NGO that assists entrepreneurs outside the cities bring their ideas to market. The primary sector of interest for the NGO are water, agriculture, dairy and energy, although they are willing to look at others on a case-by-case basis. [...]

In an effort to recognize women in the field of computer engineering and other technical fields, Google India created the ‘Google India Women in Engineering Award’ to showcase the accomplishments of standout females throughout India. The winners this year include Shruti Prakash Mahambre, Sheetal Shah, Uma Sawant and Neha Singh from IIT Bombay; Garima Lahoti [...]

Capitalizing on the attention given to the Tata Nano, a group of 5 students has built a functioning car that is priced at only Rs. 11,000, or 1/10th the price of a Nano. Using otherwise unusable scrap material, the car’s materials are excellent examples of resourcefulness and ingenuity. “The rear window of the car has [...]

 From Watblog.com The solution, basically a supply chain management system (SCM), streamlines the supply of primarily fruits and vegetables from the farmers to the retailers, known in India as Mandis. The application takes care of a lot of aspects ranging from profiling of farmer clusters, scheduling, tracking, and traceability.

From NextBillion. d.light Design is a hot new BOP start-up with funding from who’s who of the social venture capital world. They are looking for a VP – Sales to be based out of New Delhi. Position: Vice-President, Sales Location: India Organization: The goal of d.light design is simple – to eradicate kerosene lanterns from [...]

Millenum Spire, a global real estate company, is raising a $1 billion dollar fund that will focus on providing low-cost entry housing to the emerging Indian middle class. According to Ashish Bhalla (from VC Circle), who is a managing director along with his brother Abhijeet, this area of the market has largely been ignored by [...]

Here is an interesting article from Spiegel Online (thanks Avashya for letting us know about it) on an entrepreneur’s efforts to utilize the power of private equity to scale up microfinance institutions more quickly and to provide them with the capital necessary for significant expansion. One issue that comes to mind, as is discussed further [...]

This innovation has received widespread attention already, but for the sake of readers on this blog it is important to post about it just in case some of us just came back from vacations under rocks … Problem: Getting water in places with low supply above ground but supplies underground … Solution (from Triple Pundit): [...]