One poem that always inspires me is “If” by Rudyard Kipling. Its starting lines came to my mind when I learned about Brij Kothari and his brainchild PlanetRead: If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt [...]

Plastic is a daily companion, even in the remotest of villages. The roads may be not be paved, means of transport may be scarce, but there is bound to be a cluster of small stores that inevitably sell the same products – tobacco, fried snacks, water pouches, Balaji potato chips – all wrapped up in [...]

A couple of weeks back, Wipro kicked off its Eco Eye Initiative – a comprehensive programme that drives increasing ecological sustainability in all its operations, and areas of its influence. In its chairman, Azim Premji’s, own words: We firmly believe business cannot be built at the cost of ecology. It is not sustainable. Ecological Sustainability [...]

Rural lighting start-up d.light design just got featured on Forbes.com: d.light design based in New Delhi, India, has developed a trio of lights created for a market it calls the “base of the pyramid”–including people who live on the equivalent of $1 a day. Its portable Nova light, which it is debuting on Monday, has [...]

The global community is focusing a tremendous amount of attention on the potential role of Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) in significantly cutting down household energy use. Given that CFL bulbs use only 20% of the power of an equivalent incandescent lamp, the benefits are crystal clear. The only problem: cost of these bulbs. In the [...]

The Economic Times reports that SKS is planning to infuse Rs. 130 crores additional equity into the company to support its aggressive expansion plans [via Microcapital]. Here is the quote from the story: “Our investors will infuse Rs 130 crore later this year on a pro-rata basis. We may plan to induct a new investor [...]

The Economic Times reports that a new Government of India regulation would imply that Indian companies  report the finer details of their CSR spending in financial statements filed with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Its an interesting move by the Government of India, especially given the recent focus on the ‘Inclusive Growth’ agenda: To facilitate [...]

One finds heroes in the most unlikely of places and amongst the most unlikely of persons. The unlikely place – “a little-noticed corner of India, in the Bulandshahr district of western Uttar Pradesh” The unlikely person – “Virendra (Sam) Singh”, belonging to a male dominated family of zamindars and who was at a point of [...]

In mid-March, we had posted about FabIndia and their innovative business model. This time, the Business Standard has reported about the same venture, in more detail, in their weekly supplement ‘The Strategist’. FabIndia’s MD, William Bissell, means business and makes his point: If one is very serious about CSR, you may have a vice-president heading [...]

We have highlighted here at TC-I the potential for rural BPOs to create jobs.  One of the more interesting players is Dhristee, the company whose primary business is franchising rural information kiosks.  Recently the company ventured into the rural BPO space, setting up pilot unit in the rural hinterland of Bihar. CNN-IBN recently ran a [...]