Tag Archive For "selco"
Eight defining milestones in India’s social enterprise ecosystem
[Editor’s Note: This post was 95% complete on Oct 31, 2013. After all, it was largely copy-paste so why did it languish for two months in the Drafts folder? I intended to post a critique of the Companies Bill 2013. (Sigh) That’ll have to wait for another day.] I’ve been neglecting this blog for far …
Poor leap-frogging the rich?
Just read an intriguing Mother Jones article on the adoption of solar power in India’s slums. The two solar startups profiled in the article? Bangalore-based Simpa Networks and Bangalore-based Pollinate Energy. Here’s another interesting nugget – the co-founders of Simpa are two Americans and one Canadian while the co-founders of Pollinate are Australian. Australia vs. …
Building India through Enterprise – Meera Sanyal’s Jagriti Yatra Story
A year ago I had a brief encounter with a young SELCO employee (Nikhil Nair – NN) following a scintillating chat with Harish Hande. Outside in the parking lot, NN cast a curious look at my Reva while I looked approvingly at his Royal Enfield Bullet and we struck up a conversation. Two recollections stood …
SELCO Labs announces sustainable energy challenge
Earlier today, I read a tweet from SELCO’s official account that talked about a sustainability energy challenge launched under the umbrella of SELCO Labs. SELCO Labs, the innovation and incubation arm of SELCO started in April 2009 and is hosted inside the premises of SDM Institute of Technology, Ujire, Karnataka. The most interesting and revealing aspect …
Two bright lights in India’s Impact Investing Landscape
The two bright lights in India’s impact investing landscape are Harish Hande’s $10 million fund for sustainable energy enterprises and Khosla Impact. Sustainable Energy Fund Last month I finally got a chance to spend some time with Harish Hande at the SELCO office in JP Nagar, Bangalore. Our conversation ranged from ‘SELCO culture’ and non-English …
Social Enterprise Jobs in India – Who’s Hiring?
A few months ago, a 2nd year MBA student from Mumbai (let’s call him “Nikhil”) emailed me asking for advice/leads on the social enterprise sector. Nikhil had some exposure to the social enterprise sector and, when I last met him, was looking at “regular MBA” jobs as well. My immediate response was to send him …
Selco’s Harish Hande raising $10 million to fund sustainable energy enterprises
Selco Solar’s Harish Hande was one of the standout acts at the recent Villgro conference on social enterprises. Without mincing any words, he declared that it was dangerous for investors to dictate what entrepreneurs should do. It was time, he said, for entrepreneurs to say “no” to certain types of investors. He was dead serious …
Color of money
A few weeks ago, I attended the two-day Unconvention 2011 – a social enterprise conference hosted by Villgro in Chennai. Nilima Achwal (Villgro Fellow) and I co-authored our conference report on the NextBillion blog – Villgro’s Unconvention 2011 – Key Takeaways. In social enterprise conferences, impact investing topics get a fair bit of air time and …
Calling bullshit on Forbes’ List of Top 30 Social Entrepreneurs
Normally I don’t pay much attention to Top [X] rankings. Maybe today was a slow news day. Maybe I just returned from Villgro’s Unconvention and am still chewing the cud so am hyper-sensitive on who is(isn’t) a social entrepreneur, what is(isn’t) a social enterprise. Scott Anderson’s article on NextBillion alerted me to this freshly released …
The curious history of conditional cash transfers
[Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of six excerpts from chapter 4 (education policy) of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo’s Poor Economics. According to World Bank, more than 30 countries have some form of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs.] In a recent interview, Harish Hande (Founder of SELCO) and 2011 Magsaysay Award …
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