Earlier this month, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) announced a National Biomass Cookstove initiative which will provide efficient cooking stoves to rural areas.  According to the MNRE press release, 80% of residential energy in India comes from biomass (with 826 million users), which has adverse environmental and health effects, especially on women and children.  [...]

Aiming to “usher in an age of energy independence in rural India,” Servals Automation Pvt Ltd (SAPL) markets innovations to the bottom of the pyramid population.  The enterprise is involved in production, marketing, and research & design in the effort to harness the productive power of the rural poor.  This winner of the 2007 L-Ramp [...]

Villgro (formerly Rural Innovations Network) is sponsoring a new business plan competition for social entrepreneurs called Wantrapreneur.  The competition is specifically aimed at innovations and solutions that benefit the rural poor. Wantrapreneur is all about identifying ideas that have the potential to transform lives and nurturing them to become market-ready products and services. The competition [...]

We covered the arrival of TED in India earlier, and now they are looking for TEDIndia Fellows.  A message from TEDIndia organizers: Organizers of the TED Conference announced they would begin the search for 100 TEDIndia Fellows to participate in the TEDIndia Conference in Mysore, India, following upon the successful TED Fellows program launch at [...]

User Post GreenMicrofinance Celebrates EARTH DAY 2009 – Launches Online University Forum edit GreenMicrofinance™, a cutting-edge Pennsylvania-based triple bottom line company, has set Earth Day, April 22, 2009, at 5:00 PM EDT, for the launch of its online climate change and microfinance university network, the GMf University Forum™. The GMf University Forum, its own social [...]

We alerted our readers about Sankalp, and the event is now around the corner!  Check back with ThinkChange India as we bring you updates and guest posts straight from the forum.  Adrienne Villani and Sujatha Mutthaya from Intellecap provide more background: More than 300 social entrepreneurs, a plethora of international and regional investors, funding agencies, [...]

The World Resources Institute (WRI) and Nextbillion.net recently published a great interview with C. K. Prahalad on the role of private enterprise in development and poverty alleviation. Prahalad is the author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and one of the pioneers of the idea of BOP (the 4 billion people living [...]

India is represented strong in the list of participants from the 2009 Global Social Benefit Incubator, which is a program led by SocialEdge and Santa Clara University that “assists social benefit entrepreneurs in developing business plans that enable their organizations to reach increasing numbers of beneficiaries.”  The following individuals, and their associated organizations, will be [...]

D.light Design is looking for a Head of Sales & Marketing: D.light Energy Pvt. Ltd. is looking to hire an experienced and creative Head of Sales & Marketing (India) to rapidly develop a pan-India distribution channel capable of reaching deep rural, while building a powerful global brand from the ground up. This position is based [...]

The inspirational, energy-filled, and fun TED conference is heading to India this year.  From November 4-7, 2009, TEDIndia will take place in Mysore and bring together speakers and delegates that are reinventing India.  The huge success of TED makes its arrival in India even more exciting.  At TC-I, we covered a few TED talks here, [...]