Entrepreneurship with heart

Inir Pinheiro: Rural wanderlust
One million livelihoods by 2030—a tall order by any standard. Add to that the fact that these livelihoods will be rooted in India's villages not its IT parks or business hubs and you'll wonder if this is just another impossible dream. Now, 35-year old, Mumbai-based Inir Pinheiro, may be a dreamer, but he's not one to just sit on an idea. With his organisation, Grassroutes, he's actually going about realising it.
Through NGOs such as Watershed Organisation Trust, Grassroutes introduced the concept of community-run village tourism to Purushwadi, Maharashtra, in 2006. Villagers were trained as guides and prepared to open their homes to tourists. Sanitation facilities were put in place to cater to visitors unfamiliar with the rustic way of doing things. A village committee was set up to manage the financial aspect of the village's participation in the venture.
Offering city-slickers a taste of rural India—milking goats, ploughing fields, harvesting rice or simply sleeping under the stars—worked well. Soon, Grassroutes ventured into more villages—Dehna, Valvanda, Wanjushet and Shiroshi.

Ah, the village life... chilling under a mango tree, chasing chickens and watching the world go slowly past. Alas, for a social entrepreneur, it's more about staying calm when funds are low, courting investors, drafting elevator pitches for grant funds, effectively managing the expectations of villagers, tourists and investors. No time for a siesta here.

Much of Grassroutes work has involved equipping villages to deal with tourists and creating demand. They are currently working with about 20 families each in the beach villages of Adgaon, Sarva, Velas and Shekadi in Sriwardhan, through Ronnie Screwvala's Swades Foundation, to help them capitalise on the existing tourist population. Guides from Purushwadi are training these communities to ensure they are market ready in terms of cleanliness and conforming to norms, as well as taking ownership for what they have to offer.

While a postgraduate degree in rural management from the Xavier Institute of Management-Bhubaneshwar had Inir believing he could "conquer the world", experience has knocked his confidence down to more reasonable "proven levels".

From the importance of proper pricing to discovering that "working with corporates is not that bad"—the idealist has learned a lot. Tourism now accounts for just 20-25 percent of Grassroutes income, a whopping 50 percent comes from corporate training modules and the remaining 20-25 percent comes from education-related programmes. But perhaps his biggest lesson is this, "Everyone understands money. An endeavour has to be financially viable, socially acceptable and environmentally sustainable to succeed."

Inir won the Karmaveer Purashkar for Social Justice and Citizen Action 2008 and has been a fellow of the Foundation for Youth Social Entrepreneurship as well as an UnLtd. India investee. Despite almost a decade working in Maharashtra's villages, the English-speaking city-boy is still not fluent with the local dialects. "But that doesn't matter," he says. "There's this sense of acceptance in villages; everyone is connected and you always have a sense of belonging."

Speaking of connectivity, technology seems to have caught up with the kids in Purushwadi, who have been messaging him saying, "Fireflies here. Come!"

What's his biggest challenge? "Growing hair!" laughs Inir. Jokes apart, "social entrepreneurship can be a lonely road, and staying motivated can be tough", admits Inir, who spends a lot of weekends in places off the grid.

Friends, love, confidence, potential income... he's lost a lot along the way. The one thing that's held him in good stead has been "unwavering family support".

At the end of the day, he says, "it's the sense of peace that comes from fulfilling one's purpose" that keeps him going. 'Loving your idea and dating it' is the title of a TEDx presentation Inir made not too long ago; he clearly has no second thoughts about the path he has chosen.

"We've touched around 2,500 lives so far, and hope to create one million livelihoods by 2030," says the Grassroutes founder. He offers an example of how their intervention is making a difference. "Early rains last year meant that farmers had to re-sow their crops. The families that work with Grassroutes typically earn between Rs.7,000-30,000 a year—enough to buy another lot of seeds." And then there's Bhalu, who's been with Grassroutes since 2005 and has risen from village guide to village supervisor, to trainer of newer villages—a true example of growth at the grassroots level.
-Averil Nunes

E.K. Shahi and Usha Menon: Boosting knowledge
A government-led programme to teach maths differently in remote Meghalaya, using stories, songs, colours and shapes - has been winning kudos all round - Union HRD minister Smriti Irani lavished praise on the programme soon after taking charge in September last year, and recently it was judged one of the ten finalists for the Commonwealth Education Good Practice Awards 2015. It's a remarkable turnaround, for a state that only a two years ago, was ranked a poor 18th in the National Achievement Survey (NAS) in 2012-13; in basic mathematical ability, class three students in Meghalaya were found to be much below the national average.

So what brought about this drastic improvement in the short span of two years?

Jodo Gyan, a Delhi-based social enterprise, that the state education department turned to for help in 2013 to devise ways to improve mathematical learning among primary school students. Initially, it was to be a pilot, tried out in 57 government schools in the state, but within a year, the results were encouraging enough to warrant expanding the programme to 1,000 schools.

So how does it work? "Jodo Gyan has a no-textbooks approach. We believe that learning should go hand-in-hand with understanding and enjoyment; that it should harness the creativity of children and teachers," says EK Shaji, one of two co-founders of Jodo Gyan. Instead, Jodo Gyan has developed simple, colourful, non-toxic teaching aids such as a "ganit mala" or number chain, sticks, blocks, cards, shapes, etc to help children internalise abstract concepts of numbers, their operations, place value, etc.

Jodo Gyan's approach and the curriculum it follows in the schools it works with have been developed by Usha Menon, a former senior scientist at CSIR-NISTADS, a premier institution that works in the area of science, technology education and policy, among others. "One of the problems of our education sector is the huge gap between pedagogical research and practice," says Shaji. At Jodo Gyan, the programme Menon has developed draws on the latest research coming out of universities and institutes around the world, such as Netherlands's famed Freudenthal Institute, on how students, especially at the pre-primary and primary levels, learn and teachers impart knowledge and skills in the field of mathematics and science. This is then developed further, tweaked or modified, at the Jodo Gyan Kendra, a small, experimental learning centre located in Shakurpur, a resettlement colony in west Delhi. Thus, the emphasis is on developing understanding of concepts, rather than rote learning, with the teacher as a partner in the process, rather than someone children love to hate.

It's not just Meghalaya - Jodo Gyan, which was founded in 1998 by Shaji and Menon, also works with class I and II students in 13,000 schools in Punjab; another 2,000 CBSE and ICSE schools across India, including many affluent ones in the cities, have incorporated Jodo Gyan's practices and approaches in their curriculum. "We have trained more than 50,000 teachers since 1998," says Shaji.

In many ways, Jodo Gyan epitomises the classic definition of a "social enterprise" - while it works for a social cause, and it also functions as an enterprise, earning enough from its activities to meet its expenses, without having to appeal to the government for grants or private charity. Thus, while the affluent schools must pay for its services and teaching aids, government schools get them for free - the one helping to pay for the other. In fact, the latter may get better, because, Shaji says, "government school children deserve better". Even here, says Shaji, Jodo Gyan is very careful about the private schools it works with, the ability to pay being of less importance than a strong, active leadership which is receptive to changing its teaching methods, and resolute in carrying it through. "We don't want to grow big; small can be more powerful," says Shaji. That Jodo Gyan managed to earn a turnover of Rs 4 crore last year, despite all these, is a testimony to how highly it is regarded.

Jodo Gyan adheres to its social ideal in other ways, too: no one is paid too much, and no one too less, the highest does not get paid more than four times what the lowest paid gets. Then, audit reports are sent to all employees as Shaji firmly believes that "financial transparency is the heart of all transparencies". Decision-making is not a top-down approach - everyone contributes, via a chhoti (small) panchayat with representatives from all departments takes all decisions. "Even trustees must seek sanction for expenses from the panchayat," Shaji says.
-Gargi Gupta

Sumita Ghose: The bridge builder
One woman's attempt to ensure regular work for rural weavers and embroiderers has turned into a multi-crore enterprise. "I knew that there was a wonderful repository of skills and a living craft heritage in rural India," says Sumita Ghose, the woman behind Rangsutra, the remarkably successful organisation of artisan-shareholders based mostly in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. "The problem I was trying to address was that of providing work to rural artisans," Ghose says in an email interview.

Having spent a better part of her life working with artisans across the country, Ghose was well aware of rural India's strengths and weaknesses. But she was vexed by the fact that artisans seldom earn adequate money for their skill. She also noted first-hand the consequences of liberalisation wherein the educated middle-class reaped the benefits of globalization even as those from the countryside migrated from their village homes to cities in search of work.

The demand for handmade products compounded by increasing unemployment in villages prompted Ghose to conceive Rangsutra as a bridge between "rural and urban India; tradition and contemporary and change and continuity".

So, nearly a decade ago, in 2006, she motivated 1,000 artisans in and around western Rajasthan's Bikaner area to put in Rs.1,000 each and collected Rs.10 lakh. "I felt that I should also put in my share. I borrowed Rs.10 lakh from friends and family and put in my contribution," says the now 55-year-old.

With money pooled in, the artists got to work doing what they did best — bringing to life exquisite weaves, fine threadwork, such as kharek, soof, ari, as well as appliqué and tie-and-dye work. Working as a collective at every level — from fabric weaving, tailoring, embroidering and embellishing to quality control — Rangsutra ensures work for all kinds of artisans at the same time.

By following a low-margin, high-volume model, the enterprise churns out products that are affordable for the middle-class, and keeps the cycle of work moving.

Two years after its inception, sales of Rangsutra products crossed Rs.1 crore, helping it achieve break even. The next year, 2009 when it became profitable, Rangsutra paid dividend to its growing tribe of artisan-shareholders — a moment of sheer pride for Ghose.

Today, dividends are di rigeur for Rangsutra's artisan-shareholders of whom there are 3,000, mostly in western Rajasthan and eastern Uttar Pradesh. They co-own Rangsutra along with Ghose, retailer FabIndia and social venture capital firm Aavishkaar. "Seventy-five percent of them (1,800) are women, who are first-time shareholders," chips in Ghose while crediting Aavishkaar and FabIndia for bringing in professionalism in running the enterprise and ensuring that Rangsutra grew in scale. "Aavishkaar helped us plan our business and FabIndia provided access to the urban Indian market through their market knowledge and their stores."

Ghose's steering of Rangsutra has not only given India's traditional crafts a fresh lease of life, but it has also won it the World Bank Development Marketplace Award in 2011. In the same year, the enterprise was also a part of the Ethical Fashion Show in Paris in 2011.

Yet the journey so far has not been without its challenges and pitfalls, including cancelled orders and delayed shipments that invariably mean revenue loss. When such a large number of its workforce-cum-owners are rural women, getting them to leave their homes to put in time for Rangsutra was a task. Similarly, making them understand and appreciate the value of quality required by the urban and global market was a feat. "The main challenge," concedes Ghose, "was the mindset. To move away from a dependency mode to an independent, entrepreneurial mindset."

Ever the one to spot a silver lining on every grey cloud, Ghose says that over time, Rangsutra's artisans bought into the idea of ownership and of valuing their skills. "Artisans feel a sense of pride in being part of Rangsutra," says Ghose, who credits her late husband Sanjoy Ghose for exposing her to rural India and the richness of life there. "They spend their income on education for their children, sending them to private schools when they can afford it and also on healthcare for their families. Women, especially, have become economically stronger, have increased confidence and a greater say in the house. They have earned the respect of their families and communities."

Eventually, Ghose hopes to see Rangsutra as a company that is local and global, channelising the interconnectedness of our lives on the planet. "Rangsutra will show the world that there is a way of running a profitable business which benefits all and that there is enough in this world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed!"
-Marisha Karwa

Nitin Sisodia and Neeti Kailas: All ears
It all started in 2011 when Stanford India Bio-design fellow Nitin Sisodia was undergoing immersion training at a child development clinic in Delhi. A parent brought in his five-year-old and told the doctor that the child had failed to make so much as a noise since birth. The doctor's words were far from pacifying: the boy could not speak because he could not hear. "That's when it dawned upon me that early hearing screening can change a person's life," says the 36-year-old.

Children learn to speak at an early age but this ability to speak diminishes as they grow. "In the West, all babies undergo hearing screening as part of universal newborn tests but this doesn't happen in India and in other resource-poor settings," says Sisodia, who identified this from among 337 clinical needs in want of intervention.

According to a World Health Organisation report, about one in 1,000 babies born in India is profoundly deaf, and currently nearly a million children in the country are hearing impaired. Early detection leads to earlier intervention, which means a deaf child need not grow up to be a mute one. This prompted Sisodia to embark on all-consuming research, spending time at Delhi's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) observing and talking to parents of kids. He also visited audiologists and ENT specialists at Mysore's All India Institute of Speech and Hearing and interviewed numerous gynaecologists, paediatricians and maternity care professionals across the country to get an end-to-end perspective. "I learnt that newborns in India are not screened for various reasons — technological resources are expensive, healthcare workers are not always trained to use this complex technology, often times these devices don't work in the Indian setting because our hospital and clinical environment is too noisy and therefore even leads to false readings," recalls Sisodia.

Fortunately, healthcare workers and medical experts were aware of these problems. The hindrance was that they were not equipped with the right technology or the right device to address the issue. So he began work on integrating the screening technology into a device that would be tailored for the Indian setting. Based on Auditory Brainstem Response (ABR), which measures hearing nerve response to sounds to identify babies with hearing loss, Sisodia and partner Neeti Kailas developed a device that cancels ambient noise and uses fibre electrodes (in place of expensive disposables) to capture brain signals.

"We developed everything from the scratch. It is simple, safe and a non-invasive device that makes screenings easier to conduct," says Sisodia. "We place electrodes on a baby's head at three points. The baby is made to hear a stimuli in the ear and we read the brain signals."

The device, called Sohum, uses highly sensitive technology and its results are accurate to the 99th percentile, says Sisodia. While he doesn't reveal exactly how much Sohum costs to manufacture, he says that it is 1/5th of existing devices.

The purpose, he emphasises, is on ensuring universal screening for all newborns in India. "This device is for the masses. If a medical test were to cost Rs.300, a majority of the people would opt for it," says Sisodia. "We are focussing on 26 million babies... not just on lower-socio economic segments. We want to screen each and every baby that is born in India."

The device, which fetched Kailas the Rolex Young Laureate 2014 honour and has been supported by Siemens, AIIMS, IIT-Delhi and Stanford, has already generated interest by healthcare practitioners in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and even Peru.

Sisodia says that Sohum is in the second phase of clinical tests and once approvals come through, the device will be ready to install in 10 centres by the end of the year, starting with Bangalore, Vellore, Bhopal and Nagpur. "We don't want to create products that are inaccessible or meant for the top 2 percent of the population. We want to make it accessible and sustainable," says Sisodia, adding that they plan to partner with healthcare institutes and foundations to make the screening device available.
-Marisha Karwa