Jan 18, 2018

They don’t run NGOs, wear khadi or carry jholas and protest banners. The only thing that drives them is wanting to make a difference to society. Which is why they have harnessed their resources and their education to find simple solutions to everyday problems and change millions of lives. There’s Harvard graduate Gitika Srivastava, who founded Navya Network to help cancer patients access expert opinion and seek treatment accordingly. Warwick graduate Ankit Agarwal teamed up with his friend Karan Rastogi in Kanpur and found a way to process 800 kg of waste flowers into incense sticks and vermicompost, a venture they call Help Us Green.
IIM-A graduate Sucharita Mukherjee likewise teamed up with rural management graduate Puneet Gupta to set up Kaleidofin, a financial solutions firm that helps the poor manage their life goals, be it marrying off a child, completing a child’s education or building a home. ‘Impact entrepreneurs’ such as these are turning traditional business models on their heads, and leveraging technology to deliver human-centric solutions. “As a service provider, your lens needs to shift from what products you have to what the customer actually needs.
This is what these new-generation impact entrepreneurs do,” says Roopa Kudva, managing director of Omidyar Network India Advisors, a firm that invests in early-stage innovative companies.
How do these entrepreneurs do this successfully and consistently? Higher levels of mobile penetration and better internet connectivity help. So does the access to data. Every user in the digital world is leaving a footprint as she browses, and that becomes marketable data. So Prerna Mukharya’s Outline India captures qualitative data from rural India, which governments and others use to design effective social schemes. Equally perceptible, however, is the determination to do good. “You are seeing entrepreneurs as well as investors driven by a sense of purpose. That precedes the desire to make money,” says Kudva, whose firm has invested $225 million (around Rs 1,440 crore) in Indian firms so far. May their tribe increase.