10 New Ideas that Could Change the World

The launch of the inaugural issue of Beyond Profit coincides with Sankalp, South Asia’s largest Social Enterprise and Investment Forum.  Below are the stories of ten Sankalp Entrepreneurs. They were selected for their innovation, tenacity, and vibrancy (not reflective of the Sankalp awards process), and most of all, their potential for impact. Adrienne Villani and Sujatha Muthayya report.

A New Slate: Beyond Reading, Writing, Arithmetic

Butterfly Fields, Sharat Chandra

Sankalp Category: Education for All

While children around the world have had the privilege of conducting science experiments, taking music lessons, and dabbling in art classes as part of their school curriculum for decades, the average Indian student has led a more academically-focused existence.  In 2005, Sharat Chandra decided to do something about this.

His organization, Butterfly Fields, now tries to infuse creativity into the minds of young students and bring back the fun of learning by making learning “easy, enriching, and enjoyable.” Working with mainstream schools as a form of enrichment program, its centers provide children with opportunities for hands-on learning, cooperative learning, social interaction, and real-life problem solving. Chandra elaborates: “At Butterfly Fields, we believe that a critical aspect of learning is about direct experiences with materials, objects, and phenomena and how they interact with each other.”

The learning center enables children to explore and practice skills to their own satisfaction. Teachers are encouraged to focus their classes on conceptual learning and to make them more exciting and motivating.  Students are asked to constantly question and challenge the way things are around them.  In just one year, armed with a core team of five, Butterfly Fields has created 25 innovative curriculum advancements and 150 hands-on activities linked to this curriculum.

The Butterfly Fields approach is a paradigm shift in ideas about learning in India.  Chandra believes that very little has changed either in pedagogy, methods of learning, or assessment in the last five decades and he looks to the telecom sector for inspiration: “What happened in the telecom sector in India too has to happen in the education sector – thoughtful deregulation, flow of professional talent in the delivery, setting up of proper data collection mechanisms, and the sharing of data by keeping it in the open domain to fuel further research.”

If the Butterfly Fields approach succeeds Chandra believes that India will emerge as the largest pool of skilled and quality human resource for global markets. It is our hunch that we will see Butterfly Fields as a significant contributor in grooming the newer generations to achieve this vision.

Cultivating the Joy of Learning

Joy of Learning, Prashant Joshi

Sankalp Category: Education for All

The stresses of education are hitting children earlier and earlier.  Test scores determine their future, and the stress of studying for and taking these exams eats at everyone – parents and teachers included.  Prashant Joshi founded Joy of Learning to combat this academic stress and anxiety, complimenting mainstream education and attaching positive emotions to learning activities.

Joy of Learning is a tiny organization engaged in developing educational aids, including books, cards, and other materials, especially for early childhood education.  It aims to develop products that enable quality education for children, which is essentially stress-free and enjoyable. According to Joshi, “Joy of Learning helps children to develop their academic skill-sets, with minimal effort and without the drudgery of rote learning.” Perhaps most importantly, Joy of Learning provides a system that gives commensurate impetus to the bright students as well as the slow learners.

On Joy of Learning’s methodology, Joshi notes, “We hear a song just once, and if we like it, we remember it.  This happens because of intensity of involvement and positive attitude.  If an educationist is able to evoke similar interest in learning, it too can become equally effective.”

Up to now, Joy of Learning has concentrated its efforts on mathematics, “the killer subject.” It is common for children to have “math phobia,” and diagnostic studies reveal that though math fear starts setting in from Standard V (ages 10-11), it becomes an “area of concern” only after children reach standard VIII  (ages 13-14) and above. Joy of Learning attempts to combat this phobia by creating board games and card sets that enable children to play various games that enhance mathematical thinking, improving efficiency in calculation, and developing conceptual clarity.

Joy of Learning runs Activity Centers and conducts camps for children, where they practice various Joy of Learning methods to improve their skill sets under trained supervision. While Joy of Learning is still operating at a skeleton level, its books have been included in the reading lists of four schools in Nagpur for the 2008-2009 academic year.

What does Joshi see for the future?  “One of the main strengths of Joy of Learning is its scalability.  It can be operated from the miniature model (as is its present form) at the same time it can be easily scaled up to mega level with comparative ease.” Joy of Learning is looking for torch bearers; maybe this is the perfect opportunity for you!

Live and Dye Naturally

Aura Herbal Textiles, Sonal and Arun Baid

Sankalp Category: Environment and Clean Energy

Indian prominence in herbal dyeing goes back more than 4000 years. Historically, India was known as the “golden sparrow” because of its pioneering role in the use of indigo. People who wanted indigo as their primary spoil repeatedly attacked the subcontinent. But, Indian prominence in herbal dying began to decay in the 19^th century when the technique was lost due to the invasion of cheaper and easy-to-use synthetic dyes. Sonal and Arun Baid, with their company Aura Herbal Textiles, hope to return India to its previous position of distinction in this field. “I can proudly say, after studying different natural dyeing processes all over the world, that India had the most intelligent process and recipes for the herbal dyeing,” says Arun Baid.

After successfully experimenting in their kitchen nine years ago with the ancient technique of herbal dying to see if the process actually stained fabrics, Sonal and Arun Baid started their own company, which today, has 60 employees.  Aura Herbal Wear produces herbal textiles and dyes, helping to prevent global warming and pollution related to textiles. What also sets Aura is apart is their choice of medicinal herbs in their process; amazingly, the medicinal qualities of the herbs are retained in the fabric.  To a certain extent, Aura Herbal Wear produces “clothes that heal.”

The Baids see themselves as offering customers the choice to use herbal dyed textiles over chemically dyed ones. Says Arun, “Environmentally-conscious individuals and institutions will all benefit from our process, which is the only process that can create a total eco-cycle in textiles – from organically growing the cotton and herbs to turning the cotton into fabric to dying it with herbs.  The waste generated then goes back to the farms as manure to generate the cotton and herbs again.”

As demand for “natural fibers” increases due to greater global awareness of the ecologically harmful effects of chemical dyes, so does the Baid’s business. Arun Baid sees a future where herbal dying will be the only option left for processing textiles.

Shedding Light on Small Solutions for Big Changes

Small-Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund, Vipula Sharma

Sankalp Category: Environment and Clean Energy

In developing countries, the public sector is unable to provide necessary utility services.  Consequently, many poor households and communities lack the infrastructure necessary for poverty alleviation and to maintain good health.  Currently, it is estimated that two billion people in the developing world live without access to clean water, reliable electricity, and effective sanitation.  While many international bodies are working on these development challenges, it is proving difficult.  This is where the Small-Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund (S3IDF) steps in – providing utility services through decentralized small-scale mechanisms and at a cost that people can afford.

Through its Social Merchant Bank model, S3IDF provides the poor with linkages to technology, financing, and business know-how. S3IDF acts as an interface between modern energy supply chains and unconnected poor communities, implementing financing options for residents and extending their access to infrastructural know-how. “In our model, the poor are multiple stakeholders – as users, SME employees and even SME owners – of these pro-poor, environmentally-friendly, and financially sustainable enterprises,” says Vipula Sharma, CFO and acting CEO of S3IDF.  “The enterprises mentored/incubated by S3IDF are financially viable and completely recover their capital and operational costs while giving a good return to the entrepreneur even after including financing costs.”

For S3IDF, the market is there: poor people spend a high proportion of their income on traditional and inefficient energy services, such as firewood, candles, batteries, and kerosene. S3IDF takes this well-known fact, and doubles its impact by serving income generating end-users, such as shop keepers, grain millers, farmers, women’s groups, and other small enterprises in an innovative and entrepreneurial way. The poor benefit as S3IDF’s services are put to both productive end uses that increase income and consumptive end uses that improve living conditions.

Small-scale solutions are also much more viable because the interventions required are localized and decentralized in comparison to large-scale ones. Says Ms. Sharma, “There is a high degree of replicability in our model, for similar communities with similar financial and technology access problems.  Monitoring and evaluation and ‘lessons-dissemination efforts’ are geared to induce ‘big players’ like government, the World Bank, etc., to support such projects and adopt such methodologies that can be incredibly cost-effective in poverty alleviation and environmental benefits.”

Meeting a Quadruple Bottom Line

Adithya Medical Services, J. Karthikeyan

Sankalp Category: Healthcare Inclusion

Diagnostic x-ray generation systems have not changed much since their discovery by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen in 1895. The system involves capturing high-energy penetrating x-ray beams on a photographic film and processing the film to get a negative of the patient. Adithya Medical Systems is revolutionizing this system.

Adithya provides cost-effective, life and environment-enhancing products and solutions that deliver quality, safety, and convenience. Driven by the failing quality of x-ray machines entering the Indian market, Adithya created a solution.  By directly converting x-rays into digital images, Adithya has eliminated costly x-ray film.  Using their patented technology, they have reduced the cost of digital imaging to 1/10^th of other comparable systems’ cost – from INR 1 crore (US$200,000) to INR 10 lakhs (US$20,000). Says Mr. Karthikeyan, one of the founders of Adithya, “By breaking this price barrier, we are making this high-end technology affordable to the diagnostic center next door.”

While many medical technology companies have revolutionized the industry, Adithya Medical Systems has taken this one step further by creating a quadruple bottom-line product. “We are pleasantly changing the market in a number of ways. Our product is creating a new market for affordable, reliable, and accessible medical care.”  Adithya currently targets government hospitals, small hospitals, and stand-alone diagnostic centers in semi-urban and rural areas as potential consumers of its product, where x-ray film often runs out.

Adithya delivers high quality health care at low cost by working with reduced capital and operating costs. It protects the environment by eliminating liquid pollution, reducing radiation, and saving energy – there are no consumables used compared to the film-based x-rays and operators are less affected by radiation. It has deskilled operations and made it possible to employ unskilled youth – the product is highly user friendly and can be operated even by a 10^th pass student (high school student), opening up employment opportunities in several rural and semi-urban areas. And it has created a profitable and salable product because it can be added to existing x-ray generators. Additionally, Karthikeyan  says, “By going digital, access to high quality diagnosis is made possible. The images can be digitally transmitted across the world for diagnosis by an expert radiologist.”

“As a team, we have seen accident patients suffer for days without diagnosis, as film was not available.  We have seen the pain that aged and arthritis-affected patients and our own relatives have to undergo to have an x-ray done.  These have been our motivators to give society a tool to reduce pain and suffering,” explains Kartikeyan.

Finding the Missing Link: Value for Producers and Consumers

Industree Crafts, Neelam Chhiber

Sankalp Category: Agriculture and Rural Innovations

While globalization and increasing international trade have reduced barriers between countries in the past quarter century, domestically, in India, these barriers still remain erect. India’s urban and rural markets are still poorly connected, but Industree Crafts is playing its part to reduce these barriers. Industree connects two ends of the spectrum – the rural artisan and the urban market.

“Industree was set up as a result of our realization that the craft sector in India is badly organized.  The quintessential thing to be done to improve the lives of the craftsmen, who are the most exploited lot in the whole value chain, was to create a dedicated craft brand for the products of rural artisans in the most remote of Indian villages, and to provide them training to improve the marketability of their products,” says Neelam Chhiber, Industree’s Founder and Director.

Sustainability is at the core of Industree’s mission and work.  According to Chhiber, the most important aspect of Industree’s work is “empowering primary producers – providing them with the necessary skills, institutionalizing them, and helping them move up the value chain.”.  At Industree, artisans own equity in the production and the retail of their products; there is no stronger way to give ownership and build self-esteem.

In order to cater to the distinctive demands of both producers and consumers, Industree works through a hybrid model that includes a for-profit component, Industree Crafts Private Limited (ICPL), and a non-profit wing, Industree Crafts Foundation (ICF).  The former involves retail, design, sourcing, warehousing and direct artisanal enhancement across its rural village centers, while the latter acts as a conduit for capacity building, skill training, and design development.

Industree focuses both on domestic retail and export markets in its quest for expanding markets for sustainable production. In 2007, though, it scaled up its presence in Indian retail, as this market is less prone to demand fluctuations, easier to understand for the company, less risky, and demands lower capital investments.

Essential for long-term social change, Industree is upholding its commitment to remain a sustainable and fair trade brand and continuously spreads awareness on sustainable consumption.

Here, the Grass is Always Greener

Wonder Grass, Vaibhav Kaley

Sankalp Category: Highly Scalable Social Models

Habitat is an essential part of the lives of individuals in a modern society.  There is a sense of security that arises when people have a roof over their heads.  Not only does habitat provide shelter from the elements, but also it contains and nurtures relations, emotions, and aspirations.  Wonder Grass seeks to meld these two important characteristics of habitat together by bringing bamboo and bamboo-based building systems into the mainstream construction industry in India. Not only are Wonder Grass’s “habitat solutions” affordable and beautiful, but by working in bamboo, they are sustainable and responsible.

“We started Wonder Grass to establish bamboo as a material at par with every other building material in the mainstream construction industry,” says Vaibhav Kaley, Director of Wonder Grass.  According to Kaley, a sustained and entrepreneurial effort in bamboo-based construction will continuously bring down building costs by improving the efficiency of supply-delivery chains of bamboo-based systems.

The housing shortfall in India today stands at 22-25 million dwelling units.  On an average, 250,000 housing units are damaged every year due to natural disasters.  The demand for building-solutions is rising exponentially in fast growing urban centers as well as in remote, rural areas.  Bamboo, a resource with which the Indian subcontinent is bestowed in abundance and a resource that is spread across the length and breadth of the country, presents a regenerating and sustainable alternative to address these burgeoning housing demands.

Bamboo houses are energy-efficient; the spread and demand for bamboo-housing prompts farmers to initiate bamboo plantations on their land, which become a source of steady income for the family; the increase in bamboo plantations in the peripheries of villages has an indirect spin-off effect on the local ecosystem; and bamboo brings carbon-economy benefits.

This large demand for housing exists both among the luxury segment and among the common man. Hence, Wonder Grass approaches this issue with a two pronged strategy – designing and building sustainable habitats for the luxury segment in urban centers, a low volume/high margin business, and designing and building affordable dwelling units for rural households, a high volume/low margin business.

Weaving Rural Dreams

Rural Outsourced Production Enterprise (ROPE), Nedumbally Narayanan Sreejith

Sankalp Category: Agriculture and Rural Innovations

If you thought the great Indian outsourcing story ended with giants like InfoSys and Satyam, look again. In a small village called Melakkal near the Indian town of Madurai live two of the newest faces of India’s outsourcing story.  Murgesan is the head of a local producer group, and Malarkodi, his wife, supervises a group of women who weave rope from banana fiber taken from local banana plantations. Little do they know their product feeds into IKEA’s supply chain. In fact, they’ve never even heard of IKEA.

In 2006, while working with a rural BPO based in Madras’ Indian Institute of Technology’s (IIT-M) Rural Technology and Business Incubator (RTBI), Nedumbally Narayanan Sreejith’s previous experience in microfinance pointed him to a potential outsourcing opportunity: leveraging local resources, fine-tuning skills, forming producer groups and supplying unique artisanal products to larger companies.

Sreejith approached RTBI with his idea, called Rural Outsourced Production Enterprise (ROPE), which they later funded.  ROPE developed a model of sub-contracting production needs of urban clients to village-based production centers, and utilized technology for efficient production organization, execution and delivery.

ROPE’s model is unique for several reasons. In Sreejith’s words, “We offer customized production as per our clients’ needs. Secondly, our approach competes with modern manufacturers on price and quality. The model is also vastly scalable as there is a large rural need, a vast number of outsourced products, and the production centers require low capital and overheads. Furthermore, the use of ICT enables us to carry out efficient operations. ”

ROPE’s rural centers produce hand woven and knitted products, like mats, carpets and window shades. In the future, they plan to expand into cotton and silk fabrics and apparel.  Some of the prominent names in their client list now include IKEA, Industree Crafts, and CwithCo, New York.

While Sreejith dreams of expanding into new markets, the dreams of Murugesan and the women of his group for access to better education, healthcare, and increased incomes come closer to reality.

Weathering Heights

Neurosynaptic Communication Private Limited, Sameer Sawarkar and Rajeev Sharma

Sankalp Category: Healthcare Inclusion

Meet Neurosynaptic, makers of low-cost, high-quality telemedicine and weather monitoring kits. Founded in 2002 by Sameer Sawarkar and Rajeev Sharma, Neurosynaptic Communication Private Limited (NCLP) brings technological solutions to problems at the bottom of the pyramid. Their out-of-the-box thinking puts answers to healthcare and agriculture in a box.

Sameer Sawarkar says, “We started with a question – can telemedicine and remote diagnostics bridge the healthcare divide for rural areas affordably?”  NCLP developed the ReMeDi™ (Remote Medical Diagnostics) range of products and comprehensive telemedicine solutions in collaboration with the TeNeT group of the Indian Institute of Management, Madras to address this question. This solution allows transmission of various vital parameters about the patient to a doctor for preliminary diagnosis. To address the lack of availability of trained medical professionals in the villages, the solution has been developed such that after a minimal amount of training, even a high-school graduate can operate it.

The solution provides complete Electronic Medical Records, images, various health parameters like ECG and heart sounds, as well as audio-video conferencing at very low bandwidth, thereby making it an excellent platform for rural and remote healthcare delivery in villages.

Taking on agriculture with the same innovative thinking, NCPL has designed and piloted automated weather monitoring systems. “The high cost of weather monitoring stations and the non-granularity of the data are the major drawbacks for accurate weather monitoring in India”, Sameer says. Neurosynaptic has developed Indradhanu Automatic Weather Stations which measure various weather parameters like atmospheric pressure, temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind-speed and wind-direction from the place of installation and then transmit them to a central server either over the Internet or a GSM connection.

Indradhanu has been certified by the Indian Meteorological Department for accuracy and other specifications. It is powered by a solar panel with backup battery and has protection from extreme weather conditions. About 100 of these stations have been deployed in three districts of Tamil Nadu under an order from the Department of Science and Technology and deployment plans in other states are in the pipeline. Over 300 ReMeDi kits are now deployed in several states across India.

In a Whirlpool of Innovation

Vortex, Vijay Babu

Sankalp Category: Highly Scalable Social Models

On November 23, 2008, a small queue of people filed past an ATM in an internet kiosk, inserted their biometric cards, got their thumbprints verified and withdrew the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) wages due to them. In this small way, these villagers of Periyakanganakuppam village of Cuddalore District in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu played an important role in the first deployment of Vortex’s indigenous low-cost ATM technology.

Mr. Vijay Babu, CEO of Vortex recalls, “Earlier, the distribution of NREGS wages was done manually and involved delays. Now, our ATM solution has been coupled with SBI no-frills accounts for all the NREGS beneficiaries in about 4 villages, and Tamil Nadu government transfers of the NREGS payments for the work done by these villagers to their individual bank accounts. The villagers can now come to any of our ATMs and withdraw money using fingerprint based authentication. I was moved to see the joy of these villagers when they get their full entitlement and that too as and when they want it.”

The journey started in 2004 when a few leading banks in India approached Professor Jhunjhunwala of IIT-Madras to find a way to reduce the total cost of ownership for an ATM, especially for rural areas. Their requirements were clear – they wanted an ATM that could be easily used by an average rural person, could consume less power, could handle the power loses of rural locations and be able to dispense dirty notes.

Armed with this product specification, Mr Kannan along with the TeNeT Group of IIT-Madras set out to design a completely indigenous low-cost ATM. Their design solution, called the Vortex Gramateller did not require air conditioning, consumed less than 50 watts of power, had an inbuilt battery back-up for four hours of operations and could accept soiled notes for dispensing. In the context of rural India and high levels of illiteracy, they also integrated a biometric authentication unit which displaced the need for a Personal Identification Number.

As simple as the Gramatellar would finally look, it has been a long journey for the product. Mr Vijay Babu, CEO of Vortex says “Vortex started the R&D in 2004 in collaboration with IIT-Madras. The product was ready for pilots by Dec 07. The first pilot ATM for a leading bank in India was installed in March 2008. An additional four pilot units were installed by June of last year. After the successful pilot, the product was commercially launched in October 2008. In the last 6 months we have shipped about 20 ATMs to about seven banks.”

On their larger vision of financial inclusion, Mr. Vijay Babu says, “I consider the low-cost point-of-sale (POS) devices, mobile phone banking and the low-cost ATMs the most important technology innovations to offer affordable and reliable banking services to BOP customers. Regional Rural Banks, Coop banks and the “Business Correspondent” model together offer banking access to the most remote village and to the poorest people”.

With India reaching out to close the gap in the last mile delivery of services, Vortex looks well positioned to maximize technology and innovation towards larger goals of access and inclusion.

* The entrepreneurs profiled were selected via a process that was not reflective of the Sankalp awards process.