India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2011

The Jubilant Bhartia Foundation, in collaboration with the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, is inviting applications for the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2011. The Award aims to identify and celebrate visionary social entrepreneurs who have demonstrated large-scale, systems-change models and are at the stage of scaling/replicating their ideas across India and in other countries.

The deadline for receiving applications is May 30, 2011.

Following an intensive search and selection process including expert reviews and site visits, three to four leading social entrepreneurs will be selected as finalists for the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The winner(s) will be announced in a ceremony coinciding with the India Economic Summit in November 2011 in New Delhi.

The Award benefits for the winner(s) include eligibility to participate in the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which provides winners with unprecedented opportunities to engage with global decision makers from the public, corporate, media and academic sectors. The finalists will be invited to the India Economic Summit from 13-15 November 2011 in New Delhi.

Please circulate this invite to your network of successful social entrepreneurs and change makers. Please  send nominations of social entrepreneurs who meet the Awards criteria. The links provided below detail the criteria, the selection process, the benefits and other relevant information on the Award. Please visit http://www.schwabfoundseoy.org/en/account/login or http://www.jubilantbhartiafoundation.com/recognising-social-entrepreneurs.html.

Start Up!, an angel investor, incubator and advisor to social entrepreneurs, will be managing the outreach and due-diligence of the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2011 on behalf of the Jubilant Bhartia Foundation.

We will be happy to respond to your queries via mail. Please feel free to connect with us at seyawards@startup-india.org or jbf_sey@jubl.com

On behalf of The Start Up! team

Where is Poverty in India?

In the last few months, there has been an ongoing debate across India to figure out who is poor, where are these poor, how many poor people are in India, so on and so forth. Everyone has joined this band wagon and have been trying to suggest a different way of measuring it and trying to push the numbers as much as possible. We have a wide range of poverty figures varying from 26% to 80% of population. Well, the good news is that our population growth has slowed down substantially. So at least our poverty numbers won’t increase any more.

It is in everyone’s interest to prove that India is very poor and a large part of our population goes hungry and without housing or water. If we are not so poor, how will we ask for aid from World Bank or ADB or IFC or USA and UK. If we are doing fine, how will NGOs demand higher and higher funding from foreign donors and foundations/agencies. How will our politicians justify allocating huge funds to social sector and developmental work and schemes like MGNREGA etc where the politicians and abureaucrats, clerks, govt officials, contractors and others get to siphon off thousands of crores of rupees into their own pockets.

Let us look at some facts. There are 60 crore active mobile phone numbers in India. And another 24 crore new people sign up for mobile phone numbers every year. So at least 50% of Indian population has phone and in next three years, 100% of Indians will have a mobile phone. How can a household that has a mobile phone, be poor? So, at least 50% of India is not poor. We have 9.4 crores vehicles in India and another 1.5 crore vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, 3 wheelers, 2 wheelers) are being sold in India every year. This does not include about 20 lakh vehicles that are exported from India every year. Now, each vehicle owner or the driver of that vehicle cannot be poor, right? We have 24.2 crore households in India. So again by vehicle statistics also, at least 50% of India is not poor. Out of these 24.2 crore households, 3.1 crore are DTH and 10.9 crore are C&S based TV households. Only 41.32% of 10 crore households do not own a TV. But this is changing fast @ of 1.3 crore new households getting TV every year. So the skeptics who proclaim and shout that more than 50% of India, are completely wrong. Above is a testimony to the fact that poverty in India cannot be more than 40% on the highest end.

I have been touring across India for last few years. I have visited villages of less than 50 people and those with 500 households. I have visited rural Bihar, Uttarakhand, HP, Rajasthan, Karnataka, Goa and other places. Everywhere I go, I try to meet local people and visit their houses. I notice that they have a bulb or a tube light or both. They have bed and cotton mattress or cooking gas cylinder and appliances like mixer, television, refrigerator and so on. Then I wonder even if they received those things in-kind from their employer or picked up from side of roard, to run or use these consumer items, one would need to pay and if they can afford to pay for gas or electricity or water, are they really poor?

In Aug 2010,, the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) estimated in its report, "How India Earns, Spends and Saves", that for the first time ever, the number of high-income households in India has exceeded the number of low-income. In 2010, there were 4.67 crore high-income (earning more than Rs 1.8 lakh per annum) households, there were 14.07 crore middle-income (earning between Rs 45,000 and Rs 1.8 lakh per annum) households, and 4.1 crore households counted as low-incomes (earning less than Rs. 45,000 per annum). NCAER, in the report also estimated the number of families having income between Rs 2 lakh and Rs 10 lakh per annum, which is close to the World Bank definition of middle class, at 28.4 million in 2009-10.

What I am debating is that absolute poverty is almost non-existent in India. May be at 5%. You will say 5% of India is 6 crores. Yes, it is but whatever we do, nature won’t let us lower our absolute poverty levels below 5%. Our only option to reduce absolute poverty numbers is to reduce population.

Relative poverty exists in India. But how much? I doubt if it is more than another 10% on top of the 5% absolute poverty. I am poor than my boss who is poor than Vijay Mallya who is poor than Anil Aggarwal who is poor than Bill Gates and my employee is poor than me and his maid is poor than him. But all of these people are not the relative poor we want to help or bring out of poverty. We are talking of people whom you look at or talk to or whose house you visit and you don’t have to use any parameter or get into a debate in any way as to whether they are poor or not. Those people for whom no one will question that they are poor, irrespective of what parameter or methodology you use.

Take a sample of 1,000 people in every metro, sub-metro, city, town and village and then do a subjective market research and analysis of this sort and you will realize that overall poverty levels in India are no more than 15% i.e. 18 crore Indians. Yes, it is still a very large number of poor people but what we need to pat our backs for, is that we brought out most of India from poverty in last couple decades and trickle down affect did work. Now, we have to set our sights on helping these 18 crore Indian to come out of poverty and bring down our poverty levels to around 8% by 2020, below which we will never get, as that’s what law of nature is.

Surya Prakash Loonker is COO of Catalyst – Social Development Consultants Pvt Ltd and lives in New Delhi. For further articles, please see his blog http://developyourindia.blogspot.com and for more details, please visit www.catalystindia.net or write to him at csdc@catalystindia.net

Are NGOs required in India?

Lately, I wonder as to why NGOs exist? Are non-profits required? Is the govt not sufficient? Do we need NGOs in traditional sense or more as catalysts / facilitators? You might wonder why am I saying this.

I have been in the social and development sector for last 2 decades. Every few years, I analyse the work I am doing and the sector itself and ask myself if my direction and strategy will lead to a developed India by 2025. My recent analysis, led to the above questions.

Today, Indian govt both at central and state level has welfare schemes for everything. Children, women, health, environment, wildlife, education, livelihoods, social security, electricity, road, school, water, sanitation, ..., you name it and there is a Scheme run by Govt of India. GoI has even launched a website so that you can find a scheme relevant to you.

Now, there are schemes and the resources behind them. Both are unlimited and mostly unutilised. Still NGO sector in India scrambles to raise funds to do the welfare of the poor Indians. Why cannot NGOs act as catalyst or facilitator and bridge the gap between people and govt schemes? Can't they empower people to ask for their own rights and teach them how to access their rights? Isn't it far cheaper to be a catalyst, then to run these schemes themselves. It can easily be done at 1/10th the cost of running an actual scheme. So why raise lakhs and crores of Rupees when you can do it for few thousands or lakhs of rupees. Also, NGO resources are always limited but govt resources are practically unlimited. Is it not better to teach people to tap these unlimited resources than go after limited donations to do welfare yourself?

It leads to the age old conundrum. If i do it myself, i get the name, credit, fame. If i show the way, I will hardly even get recognition. So is it that NGOs in India want to survive for generations and so unable to do the right thing. As soon as I put this question before NGOs, I know what the response will be. We are different, we are unique, we provide quality, there is corruption in govt, we cannot work with govt, govt is inefficient, govt cannot do it the way we can do it, govt does not provide what i provide and so on. I wonder if we can put our differences aside and get united to help the poor instead of funding our own survival.

India Social Entrepreneur Award of the Year - 2010

The Jubilant Bhartia Foundation and Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, in collaboration with The Hindustan Times and Mint, are inviting applications for the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2010. The Award aims to identify and celebrate visionary social entrepreneurs who have demonstrated large-scale, systems-change models and are at the stage of scaling/replication their ideas across India and in other countries.

The deadline for receiving applications is July 1, 2010.

Following an intensive search and selection process including expert reviews and site visits, four to five leading social entrepreneurs will be selected for the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award. The winner(s) will be announced in a ceremony coinciding with the India Economic Summit in November 2010.

The Award benefits for the winner(s) will include participation in the Regional Meetings of the World Economic Forum, inclusion in the Schwab Foundation network of leading social entrepreneurs, possible nomination to the Forum of Young Global Leaders and the Global Agenda Council, and eligibility to participate in the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

We request you to circulate this mail widely to your networks of social changemakers. The attached document details the criteria and other relevant information on the Awards. If you wish to apply, please visit http://www.schwabfoundseoy.org/india.

Start Up!, an incubator and advisor to social entrepreneurs,- will be managing the outreach and due-diligence of the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2010 on behalf of the Jubilant Bhartia Foundation. We will be happy to respond to your queries via mail. Please feel free to connect with us at seyawards@startup-india.org or jbf_sey@jubl.com.

Social Entrepreneurs in the making

Check out these interesting men and women and their meaningful "next" lives

Rahul Verghese (Ex Motorola, gave up his high powered marketing job and started runningandliving.com)

"I started enjoying the tremendous psychological, health, and other benefits of running only after the age of 40. My mission is to help every man woman and child, unleash their personal potential by rekindling their joy of running. It's amazing what such a simple thing can do for you. It's no wonder that running is the most participative and fastest growing 'sport' in the world. Our goal is to get 200 million people to take up running"

http://runningandliving.com/

Abodh Aras, (Abodh was formerly with the customer services and sales department of DHL Worldwide Express) now works with Stray dogs!

Chief Executive Officer, W.S.D (Welfare of Stray dogs), Mumbai
http://www.wsdindia.org/

Manish & Arti Jain, Founders, Friendsofbooks.com (Manish is a Software Architect who built software in the US for several years, before returning to India. He is an IIT Roorkee and Texas Tech University alumni, who loves to read as much as he loves to code. www.friendsofbooks.com is his labor of love.Arti has a BA in English from Delhi University, an MA in Mass Communication from Jamia and an MFA in Cinema from San Francisco State University. Arti is an independent media professional in her "other" life.). They started up an online library from where books can be rented.

http://www.friendsofbooks.com/about.htm

Where are the philanthropists who can fund real Scaling Up

Last two decades have been decades of scaling up businesses all across the globe. The social sector across the world began to realise the need to scale up in the last decade or so. In India, social sector scaling up is still at very nascent stage. We did see some examples recently - CRY, Give India, CAF India, Concern India, Srijan, Prison Ministry India, HRLN and a few others. But real scaling up is yet to be seen in India.

We have new age NGOs from India and the world over who are trying to scale-up nationally or globally. The challenge is immense and the biggest challenge is finance required to scale up. Each of these NGOs are operating in business-like manner, working on financial sustainability from the beginning, using volunteer or in-kind mechanisms to reduce the costs, clocking a growth rate of 100% to 1000% every year making software industry look like a dwarf.

Isha Foundation's Project Green Hands have reached a scale of planting 4 million trees a year in a short span of 5 years and they will double this every year till 2020. Their target is to plant 114 million trees in Tamil Nadu in a short span of 15 years taking its green cover to mandated 33% of the available land area. Expected cost $1.2/tree, a total of $140 million. They are ready to scale up across India where they will require to plant 3.42 billion trees across India taking India's green cover to 33% and it will cost them $4 billion.

Ahmedabad, Gujarat based Mahiti Adhikar Gujarath Pahel currently has 1 mobile RTI van. It is ready to scale up across Gujarat in 1st phase with 1 mobile RTI van per district and finally across India where it will need a total of 625 mobile vans and it will expand its services from RTI to include all central and state govt schemes. The funds required is $45 million, $60,000 per district per year.

John Wood's Room To Read has plans to reach 20 million children by 2020 and is on track to achieve that. But if I would ask John whether he will be willing to reach 1 billion children by 2025, he will say yes too. Problem is the staggering $250 billion required to achieve that. His cost per child is quite higher at $275 per child per year. But am sure, he will reduce it by half once he achieves the economies of scale as soon as he crosses the 10 million children mark by 2015. That's a straight away reduction of $125 billion.

When we have minds and business acumen like John's in the social sector today, what we are lacking is the serious philanthropic capital commitment of the likes of Warren Buffett and William Gates II. We need every individual on Forbes 100 Richest People in the World list to seriously look at their wealth and their commitment to the world. Can they open up their purse strings to funds these social sector scale ups? Similarly, Boards of Fortune 500 list of companies need to have a serious board meeting asking themselves if they are really fulfilling their commitment to their stakeholders by hoarding away billions of dollar of profits in banks.

I hope Carlos Slim, Mukesh Ambani, L N Mittal et al are listening. I request Exxon Mobil, Wal Mart, ING, Toyota are to think.

Surya Prakash Loonker
sploonker@gmail.com

Social Audit should be mandatory and compulsory in all govt schemes, ministries and govt departments

What is a Social Audit ?

• A social audit is a process in which the people work with the government to monitor and evaluate the planning and implementation of a scheme or programme, or indeed of a policy or law. The social audit process is critically dependent on the demystification and wide dissemination of all relevant information.
• Social audit - conducted jointly by the government and the people, especially by those people who are affected by, or are the intended beneficiaries of, the scheme being audited.
  • Can bring on board the perceptions and knowledge of the people,
  • Can look at outcomes and not just outputs,
  • Can involve the people in the task of verification,
  • Also, much greater acceptability by the government.

The Scope of a Social Audit

• A social audit is conducted over the life span of a scheme or programme, and not just in one go or at one stage.
• It audits the process, the outputs and the outcome.
• It audits planning, implementation, monitoring and evaluation.
  

Elements of a Social Audit

• Raising awareness of rights, entitlements and obligations under a scheme.
• Specifically, about the right to participate in a social audit.
• Ensuring that all forms and documents are user friendly.
• Ensuring all relevant information is accessible, displayed and read out.
• Ensuring that the decision making process is transparent, participatory and, as far as possible, carried out in the presence of the affected persons.
• Ensuring that all decisions, and their rationale, are made public as soon as they are made.
• Ensuring that measurements, certification and inspection involves the affected people on a random and rotational basis.
  
• Ensuring that there are regular (six monthly) public hearings (jan audit manch) where the scheme and the process of social auditing is publicly analysed.
• Ensuring that the findings of social audits are immediately acted upon.
• Also ensuring that these findings result in the required systemic changes.

Benefits of Social Audit

• Reduction of corruption.
• Increased effectiveness of a program or project or scheme.
• Benefits reach the people.
• Government becomes more responsible and accountable.
• Power in hands of the public.

I, Surya Prakash Loonker, am proposing that Social Audit should be mandatory and compulsory in all govt schemes, ministries and govt departments. Just like RTI, Social Audit can be a powerful tool in hands of the people. Social Audit is the next step after RTI. RTI gets you information. Social Audit actually helps get results or solve problems. Please campaign to make Social Audit an Act through legislation.