This post is written by guest writer Jaidip Patel, who has led a sports for development programme, Ahmedabad Ultimate, and is currently based in Hyderabad.   This year’s Khemka Forum on Social Entrepreneurship leapt new bounds for India’s development sector as pioneers, leaders and delegates converged in Hyderabad on 17-18th November, 2011. Hosted on familiar [...]

The Jubilant Bhartia Foundation and the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship today announced the finalists of the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year (SEOY) Award 2011. These include Husk Power Systems (founded by Gyanesh Pandey), Industree Crafts Foundation/Industree Crafts Private Limited (Brand -Mother Earth) (founded by Neelam Chhiber), Magic Bus (founded by Matthew Spacie) and [...]

It is encouraging to see that the impact investing industry in India is gaining mainstream recognition these days. Businessworld, the country’s main business magazine ran a cover-story in November titled Social Capital, featuring all the major social venture capitalists in the country. Almost all of the organizations featured in the story were covered by us [...]

Ashoka’s Changemakers just announced the finalists for their newest web-based competition - Leveraging Business For Social Change: Building The Field Of Social Business. Changemakers is an Ashoka initiative, begun in 1994, that advances the vision of an “Everyone a Changemaker” world. Through online collaborations and communication, Changemakers helps advance and scale blossoming social innovations. The entries submitted [...]

Sankalp, the annual social enterprise awards and investment forum organized by Intellecap, took place this week in Mumbai.  The Sankalp Awards recognized many innovative and sustainable models in the following categories: Agriculture, Food and Rural Businesses; Clean Energy; Health, Water and Sanitation; Inclusive Education; and, Technology for Development. The 2010 winners are: Agriculture, Food and [...]

In June 2008, we wrote about Husk Power Systems in relation to how it is one example of the type of ventures that are capitalizing on the fact that India is a prime nation for renewable energy innovations and adoption. The beautiful simplicity of the technology uses rice husks to create a distributed, sustainable source [...]

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 [...]

India has been found to be particularly fertile ground for experimentation with renewable energy initiatives. The latest version of Ernst & Young’s “Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index” reaffirms this fact, ranking India as the third most attractive market for renewable energy investment: India’s rise to third overall … has been precipitated by excellent national and [...]