Entries Published On June, 2011
War stories from Ashoka Fellow Solomon Prakash
Solomon Prakash knows a thing or two about social entrepreneurship. After all, he’s devoted the last 20 years in pioneering work in education, poverty alleviation, employment and labor related social enterprises. MAYA, Maya Organic, and LabourNet are initiatives started and run by him until he took up a full-time role (in 2010) with Ashoka as …
Global Easy Water Products’ Journey to Profitability and Beyond
[Editor’s Note: On the sidelines of Sankalp Forum 2011 (which changed the pace of this blog last month), I had a brief conversation with the affable Om Prakash Singh, CEO of Global Easy Water Products. I followed up with a phone conversation and this post is the result of those conversations and some related research.] …
Acara Summer Institute 2011 Day#1 Highlights
As I wrote in my introductory post on Acara last week, the Acara Summer Institute 2011 is in full swing this week at the Honeywell Bangalore campus. I attended 90% of the first day sessions and plan to return for days 4 and 5. I’ve tried to capture the day’s key highlights. Classroom Sessions by …
Bangalore BOP Salary Trends on Babajob – visualized
A few months ago, we covered Babajob’s 4-year journey – A monster in the making: the Babajob story. During our meeting, Sean Blagsvedt (Babajob CEO) mentioned that they were working on visualizing the salary data from the rich datasets in their job seeker profiles. Earlier this month, they released the data on their Facebook page. …
The Acara Institute Challenge: inspiring social entrepreneurship at the university level
[Editor’s Note: In the past fortnight, I had a Skype call with Fred Rose, Co-Founder & CEO of Acara Institute, and a meeting with Arun Patre, their India Manager. The Acara Summer Institute 2011, an intensive 3-week social entrepreneurship program, kicks off in Bangalore on Jun 27 and I’m one of the guest bloggers. This …
India’s Largest Rural BPO’s ambitious plan to create ‘hubs’ in every rural district
[Editor’s Note: Yesterday I drove up to Whitefield to meet Murali Vullaganti, co-founder and CEO of India’s largest rural BPO, Rural Shores. What I heard must have excited me because I’m publishing this post with a mere 1-day gestation period – a record for this fledgling blog.] A different breed of social entrepreneur By …
Some GDP and health trends from Gapminder
A friend alerted me to Gapminder.org a while ago and today I finally sampled some of their amazing datasets via their nifty Trendalyzer. If you haven’t heard of Gapminder, their mission statement should catch your attention: Fighting the most devastating myths by building a fact-based world view that everyone understands. Their website describes Gapminder as …
BPO-level education for illiterate villagers in 8 months!
[Editor’s Note: Last month I spent a few hours chatting with Sunil Savara at his Koramangala office. Savara is co-founder of Head Held High, a social enterprise with aspirations to become the largest vocational training institute in the world. Prior to starting Head Held High, Savara was co-founder and CEO of Automated Workflow Group for …
Vaatsalya’s affordable and high quality healthcare formula for smaller towns
[Editor’s Note: On the sidelines of Sankalp 2011, I had the opportunity to briefly meet Dr. Ashwin Naik, Founder & CEO of the Vaatsalya chain of hospitals. I finally caught up with him in person at his Koramangala, Bangalore office last week. This post is based on our conversation, email exchanges and related research.] Dr. …
Oh Crap! Where’s the One Potty Per Household Project?
[Editor’s Note: Last week, I spent a few hours with the Arghyam management team – Sunita Nadhamuni (CEO) and Vijay Krishna (Director, R&D and head of India Water Portal (one of Arghyam’s key offerings)). Arghyam is an Indian public charitable foundation setup with an endowment from Rohini Nilekani, working in the water and sanitation sector …
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