Closing Speaker - Day 1 | Impact Failure Conclave 2018

As a vocalist in the Karnatik tradition, Thodur Madabusi Krishna’s musicality eludes standard analyses. Uncommon in his rendition of music and original in his interpretation of it, Krishna is at once strong and subtle, manifestly traditional and stunningly innovative.

As a public intellectual, Krishna speaks and writes about issues affecting the human condition and about matters cultural. Krishna has started and is involved in many organizations whose work is spread across the whole spectrum of music and culture. He has co-authored Voices Within: Carnatic Music – Passing on an Inheritance, a book dedicated to the greats of Karnatik music. His path-breaking book A Southern Music – The Karnatik Story , published by Harper Collins in 2013 was a first-of-its-kind philosophical, aesthetic and socio-political exploration of Karnatik Music. For this he was awarded the 2014 Tata Literature Award for Best First Book in the non-fiction category.

He is the driving force behind the Urur-Olcott Kuppam Festival and the Svanubhava initiative, and has been part of inspiring collaborations, such as the Chennai Poromboke Paadal with environmentalist Nityanand Jayaraman, performances with the Jogappas (transgender musicians) and bringing on to the concert stage the poetry of Perumal Murugan. In 2016, Krishna received the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award in recognition of ‘his forceful commitment as artist and advocate to art’s power to heal India’s deep social divisions’. In 2017 he received the Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration Award for his services in promoting and preserving national integration in the country. In 2017, he has also received the Professor V Aravindakshan Memorial Award for connecting Carnatic music with the common Man.

Rohini Nilekani is Founder-Chairperson, Arghyam, a foundation she set up for sustainable water and sanitation, which funds initiatives all across India. From 2004 to 2014, she was Founder-Chairperson and chief funder of Pratham Books, a non-profit children’s publisher. She is Co-founder and Director of EkStep, a non-profit education platform. She sits on the Board of Trustees of ATREE, an environmental think tank, and serves on the Eminent Persons Advisory Group of the Competition Commission of India.

A former journalist, she has written for many leading publications such as Times of India, India Today, Mint, etc. Penguin Books India published her first book, a medical thriller called Stillborn, and her second non-fiction book ‘Uncommon Ground’, based on her TV show. She has written several books for young children, published by Pratham Books including the popular "Annual Haircut Day". Rohini Nilekani is a committed philanthropist and in 2017, she, together with her husband Nandan Nilekani, signed the Giving Pledge, which commits half their wealth to philanthropic causes. In 2017, she was inducted as Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Popularly known as the Clothing Man and recipient of 2015 Ramon Magsaysay Award, Anshu Gupta has studied Mass communication and has a masters in Economics. Starting as a freelance journalist, Anshu left a corporate job in 1998 and founded Goonj with a mission to make clothing a matter of concern and to bring it among the list of subjects to work on, for the development sector.

Under his leadership Goonj has taken the menacing growth of urban waste and used it efficiently as a tool to trigger large scale rural development work. By creating barter between two new currencies; labor of the beneficiaries and old material of cities, Anshu has built the genesis of a parallel economy which is not cash based but trash based.

Anshu is an Ashoka and Schwab Fellow apart from being a member of the Humanitarian Crisis Council of the World Economic Forum and has been listed by the Forbes magazine as one of India’s most powerful rural entrepreneurs. Anshu brings to the table an instinctive empathy and connect with people by dignifying the act of giving. In the macro picture Anshu has identified some basic needs outside the radar screen of the development sector and the civil society, that too by structuring imaginative solutions using urban waste.

An entrepreneur at heart, avid traveler, photographer and a journalist by training, Anshu often pens prose and poetry, giving vent to his feelings and opinions on the issues that bother him about the world around him.

Professor M S Sriram is currently Visiting Faculty at IIM Bangalore. He is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Development of Research in Banking Technology, Hyderabad – an institute set up by the Reserve Bank of India. Prior to this he was the ICICI Bank Lalita D Gupte Chair professor in Microfinance at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He has been Visiting Professor, at Centre Emile Bernheim, Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Brussels, Belgium and IIMs in Udaipur and Visakhapatnam. He is a graduate from Institute of Rural Management Anand and completed his doctoral studies at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Sriram has served as an expert on several expert committees: Task Force on revival of Rural Cooperative Credit Institutions [Vaidyanathan Committee]; Expert Committee on Kerala Cooperative Bank (as Chair); External Advisory Committee of the RBI for licencing Small Finance Banks; The Financial Inclusion Advisory Committee of RBI. He is currently on the boards of Indian Dairy Machinery Company, NDDB Dairy Services, Centre for Budget and Policy Studies, Institute of Rural Management, Anand and a Trustee of RangaShankara (Bangalore) Dastkar Andhra and Pratham Books.

He has been writing the annual “Inclusive Finance India Report” for the past three years. His book “Talking Financial Inclusion in Liberalised India: Conversations with Governors of RBI” is based on detailed conversations with RBI Governors to understand the evolution of policies on Financial Inclusion was launched recently.

Elena is co-founder and Executive President of OPES-LCEF Foundation, Trustee and Managing Director of OPES-LCEF Trust and chair of OPES-LCEF investment committee; the Opes-LCEF Fund is an early stage impact fund that provides investment, management and technical support to entrepreneurs whose businesses serve disadvantaged communities. In mid-2017 the Opes Impact Fund and LCEF (the Low Carbon Enterprise Fund) merged to leverage their common interests: a focus on early stage social entrepreneurs; provision of flexible and patient capital plus management support to help these companies thrive and grow, and an enduring focus on low carbon solutions for disadvantaged populations. The Opes LCEF merger represents the coming together of two like-minded impact investment funds, both passionate about the opportunity to fuel market change, readdress economic imbalances and foster sustainable environmental stewardship by supporting early stage innovation and entrepreneurship. The OPES-LCEF fund has a priority focus in East Africa, India and Italy.

For 10 years Elena was CEO at ACRA, a leading Italian NGO working in 16 countries and before that she spent 12 years in the investment banking industry covering emerging markets. Elena serves as a Director at Fondazione Umano Progresso, a family run Foundation, The water shop Naivasha a social enterprise in Kenya, the Social Enterprise World Forum C.i.C in Glascow, and the Social Impact Agenda for Italy, the leading network promoting impact investing in Italy. After her graduation in Management at the Bocconi University in Milan, Elena was a Monbushoo fellow at the Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo for two years.

Manoj is a senior advisor to Tata Trusts, where, in addition to his advisory role, he also owns the executive responsibility for all university/institutional partnerships, and manages the Innovations/R&D portfolio. Manoj has conceived and co-founded the Foundation for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship (FISE) to nurture social innovators through their lab to market journey. He is parallely setting up a social sector venture fund with a charter to invest in high impact, early stage product startups. Manoj is also the architect and chief evangelist of Social Alpha, an ecosystem stack that aims to provide full lifecycle, Idea-to- Impact support to social innovators and entrepreneurs.

Prior to his association with Tata Trusts, Manoj co-founded Malgharia, a boutique consulting firm that helps companies identify and address their most critical challenges and turn around business performance. He has been an entrepreneur as well as an angel/seed investor with about 15 startups in his current portfolio. He has also worked for over two decades in application software and financial services firms, playing global leadership roles, mostly in the areas of Corporate Strategy, M&A, Business Development, R&D, Innovation, and Product Management. Manoj serves on the advisory and governing boards of a number of companies, including a few non-profits and research institutions.

Hari Natarajan has around 18 years of experience in the energy sector, especially the clean energy and energy access space in India. During this period, he has been involved in a wide range of activities spanning grass-root level interventions, incubation, business development support, enterprise & end-user financing, regulatory & policy level engagement and networking, including the establishment and management of an industry association for decentralized renewable energy enterprises.

Technology solutions that he has worked with include solar home systems, mini-grids, solar pumping, pico & micro hydro systems, biogas and biomass systems, improved cookstoves, etc. He has also been involved in utility scale policy and regulatory interventions post the Electricity Act 2003.

Anish is Co-lead at Transforming Rural India Foundation (www.trif.in). Anish was part of the senior management team at PRADAN, India’s leading rural development NGO. His areas of expertise include creating business organizations run by poor communities and facilitating participation of small-holder farmers in modern value chains. He has been part of erstwhile Planning Commission’s Working Group on disadvantaged farmers, and has been involved in designing programmes on producer collectives. Anish was involved in developing small-holder poultry model, run by poor women this has emerged as the largest family poultry network in India with turnover of US $ 56 million, he is involved with National Smallholder Poultry Development Trust (www.nspdt.org), supporting more than 11,000 women.

Svati is associated with several organizations in India in the area of clean energy. Her area of work is largely in fuel efficient cookstove design and dissemination through local networks (in TIDE, a non profit organization) and from Sustaintech (a pvt. ltd company implementing a business model for institutional and commercial stoves designed by her). She is the Chair of Clean Energy Access Network, (a network of practitioners in the decentralized renewable energy. She also carries out training programmes in biomass conservation, gender and sustainable energy and planning / monitoring energy access projects. She has studied Chemical Engineering and is an alumnus of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. She has played a crucial role in shaping the space around sustainable technology innovation and dissemination, grassroots entrepreneurship models and associated policy initiatives through TIDE and Sustaintech.

Sanjiv Phansalkar is a Fellow of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He taught at Institute of Rural Management till 1994. He was a free lance consultant during 1994-2005. He worked as Team Leader of the IWMI-Tata Water Policy Prorgam (ITP) from 2005 to 2007. He was Program Director at the Sir Dorabji Tata Trusts till recently. He now works with Vikasanvesh Foundation, a research organization supported by the Tata Trusts. Sanjiv has published 7 books, co-edited one with Ajit Kanitkar and several research articles in national and international journals. He contributes a fortnightly column in the e-publication Villagesquare.in. He is a visiting faculty at IIM Udaipur.

Ramasubramanian V has 21 years of experience on site assessment, design development, fabrication, installation, and trouble shooting of micro hydro projects in Asian and African countries. In India, he has been involved in the micro hydro projects in the states of Orissa, Andhra, West Bengal, Meghalaya, Uttaranchal and Jammu & Kashmir. He has been a consultant for UNIDO for East and west African country programs on micro hydro. He has worked in Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi, Nigeria, and Ghana. He has prepared over eighty pre-feasibility / feasibility reports ranging from 5 kW to 5 MW, fabricated and installed in over 20 projects sizes ranging from 1 kW to 400 kW. He had also developed training materials on micro hydro engineering for engineers and have conducted training programs in Nigeria for GIZ. In addition to micro hydro, he has helped in design and installation of a number of small PV power plants and solar water heaters for various NGOs and individuals in India. He has been actively involved with NGOs in training school drop-outs as plumbers, electricians, solar engineers and steel-work fabricators.

He lives in a remote village in Tamilnadu practising organic farming. He has built his house using locally made stabilised mud blocks, house is completely off-grid - all the energy needs are met from a small solar power plant.

Manisha was a journalist before she joined the social entrepreneurship sector. For 22 years, she has studied, chronicled and shaped the eco-system for social entrepreneurship in India.

Manisha worked with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public for nine years as the India Country Representative and International Director for Ashoka’s youth programs. At Ashoka, she built India’s first collaborative community of social entrepreneurs. She also launched the first media and communication campaigns to promote social entrepreneurship in India. In 2009, Manisha founded Start Up! - an incubator, impact accelerator and leadership springboard for social entrepreneurs. Under her leadership, Start Up! has seeded and scaled more than 60 social ventures across 15 states. It has trained 300+ early-stage cultural leaders and social entrepreneurs to create high-impact and sustainable change models.

Start Up! also manages the India Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award – co-hosted jointly by Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, the World Economic Forum and Jubilant Bhartia Foundation. It leads a unique program with CII Foundation to recognize, train and mentor grassroots women change agents and social entrepreneurs who have emerged from historically-disadvantaged communities. Manisha has co-authored two books, 1098- Childline Calling and Opening Doors – Ten Years of Ford Foundation’s International Fellowships in India. She has served as faculty member of ArtsThink South Asia – Asia’s first arts management institute. She is a passionate believer of creating deep impact through lean teams.

Dr. Priyadarshini Karve completed Ph.D. in Physics from University of Pune, in 1998. Her first research project resulted in development of a process for converting agricultural waste into charcoal. The technology won the Ashden Award for Renewable Energy in 2002. In a career spanning more than 20 years, Dr. Karve invented a number of improved biomass burning cooking devices, to reduce smoke in the kitchen and dependence on firewood for domestic cooking in rural areas. She also worked on decentralised “organic waste to fuel” technologies. She concepturalised and lead the development of AIREC Cooking Energy Decision Support Tool, which is the world’s first technology neutral methodology that shifts the focus from laboratory performance of specific technologies to cooking energy service delivery in the user’s kitchen, in R&D and promotion of clean cooking energy technologies.

In 2005, she started Samuchit Enviro Tech, a social enterprise that promotes environmentally sustainable energy and lifestyle products. Currently she is a Member of the Board of Trustees of Initiatives for New Ecological Community Concerns (INECC), a registered society in India. She teaches courses on Sustainable Development, Climate Change, etc., as visiting faculty at Symbiosis International University, and she is co-editor of ‘Shaikshanik Sandarbh’ a Marathi language bi-monthly on Science and Education.

In recent years, She has invented an easy-to-use Samuchit Carbon Footprint Calculator for Urban Indians, and conducts workshops on climate-friendly lifestyle, carbon audits, etc. She has also been involved in mobilising urban Indians to brainstorm on sustainability and livability of Indian cities.

Jeffrey Prins is a Program Manager Renewable Energy at IKEA Foundation.

He worked previously at DOEN Foundation in a similar position for more than 11 years, funding, amongst other things, various energy start-ups in India and East Africa. Before working at DOEN, he worked in politics, for various politicians in the Dutch and European Parliament. He also served as a City Council Member in Amsterdam. He is keen to push the agenda of energy access as a means to alleviate poverty. And takes a clear interest in the Circular Economy theme, particularly via the design protocol Cradle to Cradle.

Bezwada Wilson is an Indian activist and one of the founders and National Convenor of the Safai Karmachari Andolan (SKA), an Indian human rights organization that has been campaigning for the eradication of manual scavenging, the construction, operation and employment of manual scavengers has been illegal in India since 1993. His work at SKA, a community-driven movement, has been recognized by the Ashoka Foundation which has nominated him a Senior Fellow. On 27 July 2016, he was honoured with the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

Ashok Kamath has been the Managing Trustee since 2003 and Chairman of Akshara Foundation since July 1, 2008. He has been actively involved in the strategic planning, analysis and expansion of programmes at Akshara Foundation since 2003. An alumnus of IIT-Bombay, he was formerly the Managing Director of the Indian operations of Analog Devices. He opted to leave behind a successful career in the corporate sector and involve himself in the development sector. His alma mater, IIT-Bombay, presented him with its Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2013 for his various initiatives and contributions to the field of child education. Ashok is also a Co-Founder and Trustee of Pratham Books which aims to have A Book in Every Child’s Hand.

Professor Sourav Mukherji teaches postgraduate courses at IIM Bangalore on Organization Design and Inclusive Business Models. Prior to joining IIMB, he worked with IBM and Oracle in Sales and Product Management functions (1993-1998) and for the Boston Consulting Group as a Strategy Consultant (2002-2003).

He has published papers based on his research on global competitiveness of Indian organizations, especially from the information technology industry. Today his research focus is on inclusive business models – businesses that address the needs of the poor in a financially sustainable manner. In this domain, he has authored many case studies, several of which have been published online by the Harvard Business Press. Sourav has been a consultant to organizations in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors, advising them on organization design and financial sustainability. He received the UNDP Fellowship for Research in Inclusive Business Models and the Villgrow Fellowship for Research on Social Entrepreneurship.

Dr Veena Joshi has pursued her professional activities as a consultant in the field of Energy and Development after her retirement from the Swiss Agency and Development Cooperation (SDC), Delhi in 2014. During last four years she has had opportunities to advise energy sector organisations on their HR processes as well as on their strategic program priorities. Her current thematic interests are clean energy access, livelihoods and energy, gender and energy, and energy efficiency in small industries and building sector.

During her 20 years at SDC, Dr Joshi developed and managed a large variety of programs in the Energy and Environment domain. Judicious program and partner management was at the heart of her responsibilities at SDC.

During her 10 year research career at TERI she developed her keen interest in promoting clean cooking stoves and other energy solutions for rural applications. She led the Rural Energy Research and Extension area at TERI. Her career focus on action research stems from her experiences during her research on studying the air pollution in the city of Kanpur for her PhD thesis at IITKanpur. She has completed her MSc in Physics from IITBombay.

Vijay Mahajan began working in rural livelihood promotion in 1981 with a Gandhian NGO in Bihar. In 1983, he founded PRADAN, an NGO which motivated young professionals to work at the grassroots to promote livelihoods of the poor. Moving on in 1991, he carried out two field-research studies, one on India’s rural non-farm sector and the other on financial services for the rural poor and women in India, both published internationally. Based on these, Vijay founded Basix which has since 1996, supported three million poor households through microfinance and livelihood promotion services.

Raghuraman C (Raghu), an alumnus of IIT-Rookee and Indian Statistical Institute, Calcutta; is a first-generation social entrepreneur. Raghu's career with corporate world spanning over 3 decades in India/ US is spread across Automobile, Telecom, Pharma, Electronics and Software industry; eventually at the CXO level before he jumped into entrepreneurship. His first social venture founded in 2001 in Uttarakhand to provide telecom services to the remotest areas in the hills, is the driving force behind setting up a venture focused on energy access. He has been nurturing E-Hands Energy (www.ehandsenergy.in) as a responsible social venture since 2009. With installed capacity of almost 1 MW of decentralized clean energy using micro wind & solar PV deployed with over 515 installations across 400 Indian towns/villages; E-Hands is striving hard to deliver reliable clean energy at affordable cost to the First Time Electricity Users(FTUs); particularly in the remote; off-road & off-network terrains of Himalayas.

In association with a Japanese NGO; Raghu has mentored over 30 young Executives from large Japanese MNCs under the International Corporate Volunteer (ICV) program; sensitizing these bright future leaders of Japanese giants about the social challenges in India. As an active social worker, he has facilitated grants over INR 300 Million to 400 NGOs working on rural livelihood & employment, in his capacity as the Treasurer & Founding Board Member of United Way Chennai (UWC), an affiliate of world's largest private charity. He has been speaking at several industry forums and the Corporate Boards of the donors to United Way to include the giving for Energy Access as part of the CSR spend. A small success on this was presented jointly with United Way in ACEF 2017 as the possible model of blended financing for energy access.

Raghu is also the Founding Director of CLEAN. He is the Fellow of Chennai International Centre (the CIC), the Think Tank of Chennai. Raghu is a Charter Member of TiE Chennai.

Jayamala Subramaniam comes with over two decades of experience in Strategy and Execution in Banking, Education, Agro-technology, ITES and the Development sector, across countries. She has proven expertise in identifying and establishing transformational processes for scaling standalone start-ups and start up environments within large, established organizations. She has embedded the focus on scale and pushed for clearer and stronger pathways for acceleration of successful interventions into larger practice frameworks in the development sector in water.

She is a certified Executive and Business Coach focusing on critical change areas that generate maximum impact. She has a management degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta. She is the Chief Executive Officer of Arghyam, a Bangalore based philanthropy, focusing on groundwater management.

Arvind has been with Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives since mid-2016 where he anchors the function that supports partners in their journey to build their organisations. Recently, he managed a strategy refresh exercise of the organisation.

Prior to this, Arvind has about eleven years of consulting and research experience with Deloitte, PwC and TCS. During his stint at Deloitte, he helped build the social sector advisory practice with a focus on education and skills. It was an enriching experience both in terms of the breadth of responsibilities and building an understanding of the development imperatives. He managed a variety of projects ranging from policy development, evaluation studies, due diligence advisory and strategy & performance improvement.

Earlier, at PwC, he was part of the government transformation team which looked at leveraging technology to improve service delivery across areas like public procurement, land records and other public services. At TCS he worked as part of a business research laboratory working around concepts related to systems thinking. He is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA in Strategy from Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow.

Harish Hande, the founder and Chief Executive of the SELCO Foundation, is a renewable energy entrepreneur with over 22 years of grassroots experience in meeting the requirements of underserved communities. He is also the founder of SELCO India - one of the most successful rural energy enterprises in the world.

Harish, a graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur and a Masters and PhD from University of Massachusetts returned to India in 1994, after the completion of his education, to start SELCO India, a for-profit social enterprise that provides affordable renewable energy services to poor and underserved households in rural India. Having installed the first 1,000 home lighting systems on his own, and over 450,000 systems thereafter through his company SELCO India, Harish is recognized as a pioneer of sustainable decentralized rural energy solutions.

He also founded the SELCO Foundation in 2010 as an open source platform to create solutions linking sustainable energy to poverty eradication. The inspiration for setting up the SELCO Foundation came from the realisation that SELCO-India had much learning from its decade and a half of operations that could help accelerate energy access and this knowledge could be effectively tapped by potential social entrepreneurs from different parts of the world to flatten their own learning curve. Further, social enterprises looking at providing energy services to the poor and the underserved, were often handicapped by lack of appropriate solutions that could meet the needs of the populations that they were working with, resulting in many of them providing sub-optimal solutions. Harish envisioned that the SELCO Foundation, in addition to being the sustainable solutions lab for the energy access sector, would work on other ecosystem challenges that the sector faces.

Harish has received many national and international awards including the Ashden Award (2005 and 2007) and the Asia's prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award for 2011 for “his pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor, through his social enterprise SELCO India”.

He has been working in the field of eye care since 1981 at Aravind Eye Care System. He is an active member of the leadership team that established a sustainable, scalable model of service delivery which serves all strata of the society. This has since been studied widely and replicated by eye care providers across the globe. In 1992, he shifted his focus to capacity building, training and consultancy by setting up the Lions Aravind Institute of Community Ophthalmology (LAICO) which by 2008, had worked with over 250 hospitals across the globe.

With his expertise in setting up culturally relevant solutions to the problem of avoidable blindness, he has served as an Advisor on several national and international bodies: he was the South East Asia’s Regional Chairman for the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (2000-2005) and till recently was the President of Vision 2020 The Right to Sight: India. He has been a Technical Advisor to India’s National Programme for the Control of Blindness and to the World Health Organization.

Vineet Rai is the Founder of Aavishkaar Intellecap group and chairs its Group Executive Council.

Considered as a pioneer in the Impact investment space, Vineet’s philosophy has been to build the entire ecosystem for Impact Investing rather than just financial products and tools. In line with his vision, Aavishkaar–Intellecap Group comprises Aavishkaar – the groundbreaking Impact Investment Fund Manager, Arohan – a Microfinance Institution, IntelleGrow – a Venture Debt Company, and IntelleCap – the Global Impact Ecosystem builder. The Group also manages Sankalp - the foremost Global platform for engagement around impact investing.

Stan Thekaekara, activist, thinker and social entrepreneur has worked for nearly 40 years in the field of human rights and development.

Stan's public life began in 1974 with adivasis in Bihar. In 1986, he co-founded ACCORD, to mobilise the adivasis of the Gudalur Valley, Tamilnadu to fight for their social, political and human rights. In 2000, Stan founded Just Change, an international cooperative linking producers, investors and consumers in mutually beneficial ways – rebuilding the notion of community and regaining power in the marketplace.

Stan has served as a trustee of Oxfam GB and was Visiting Fellow at the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School, Oxford University.

Stan has straddled the entire gamut of human rights and development work - from grassroots activism and long term development, to disaster management and rehabilitating youngsters with addiction problems. He sits on the Board of various non-profits and has been instrumental in founding a number of development organisations in India and abroad. He also provides support, guidance and training in field of community mobilisation and organisation development.

Known for his radical and innovative thinking on development economics, he has delivered numerous lectures, including the Alternative Mansion House Speech in London and the Fourth Annual Feasta Lecture at Trinity College, Ireland. He has also written extensively on development issues.

He has won many national and international awards for his work. Outlook Business listed him among the top 50 Social Entrepreneurs of India and described him as “the man who delights in turning textbook theories on its head”.

Ms. Bijal Brahmbhatt is currently the Director of Mahila Housing SEWA Trust (MHT). She is a civil engineer by training and is a recognized expert in habitat improvement, community development and housing finance. She oversees the MHT’s operations at the national level. She has proven experience in conceptualizing planning, managing and providing support for slum upgradation programmes across India.

Her professional experience has focused on a range of poverty alleviation issues, particularly with women, entrepreneurship, slum upgradation, Water and Sanitation, Housing and Urban planning, housing finance, housing technology and renewable energy.

He has 32 years of experience in the water, waste-water and sanitation sector helping design rainwater harvesting, aquifer recharge, wastewater recycling and ecosan systems for the Ecological Architecture firm www.biome-solutions.com.

He is an Adjunct Professor and teaches a course on Water at the Azeem Premji University, Bengaluru, India (http://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/SitePages/vishwanath-s.aspx ) . He writes a weekly column called Waterwise for the last 10 years and more in a national newspaper The Hindu (http://www.thehindu.com/profile/author/s.-vishwanath/ ).

He is an Advisor to Arghyam (www.arghyam.org) a funding agency in the water and sanitation sector in India and to Biome Trust(www.biometrust.org) which implements sustainable water and sanitation systems in schools. He has been part of the team which has written the State of Karnataka Policy on Rainwater harvesting for Bengaluru city, Faecal Sludge management for the state and Waste-water reuse for the State of Karnataka, India.

He is an expert member for the Advisory group on Auditing Waste-water projects and Sanitation projects in the State of Karnataka, India.

Sujata Sahu has over 25 years of time spent in various leadership roles in corporate IT and as an educator and facilitator working with young children. A trekker and an outdoor enthusiast, a particularly difficult solo trek into Ladakh brought home the challenges faced by the people of remote Ladakh, leading her to hang up her For Profit boots to focus her time and energy to work with children in these remote mountainous hamlets.

She started 17000 ft Foundation, with the help of her husband in 2012. 17000 ft has a simple aim, to transform the lives of indigenous mountain tribes and enable them to live better lives without being forced into migration. Sujata is the passion behind the Foundation, and the backbone behind 17000 ft’s educational initiatives. Today, in just its fourth year, the work of 17000 ft Foundation has spread to cover the entire geographical region of Ladakh, covering over 900 schools and supporting the local Government to improve the quality of education for its children. 17000 ft is now poised to start its livelihood programs to generate income for people living in remote hamlets and to improve their quality of life.Sujata is travelling the country, carrying the story of the region and its people to the outside world, a crusader for the rights of forgotten people of remote Himalayan regions.

Prachi Shukla is the Country Director for India at World Health Partners and oversees all operations in the country and serves as a liaison between the state offices in India, donors, development partners and government. She has over 17 years work experience of leading and managing large social sector programs aimed at improving health of the poor in partnership with communities, government, development agencies and private sector. Her core expertise is in strategy development, establishing innovative service delivery platforms and developing value driven high performing organization culture. As a founding member of WHP, Prachi has successfully led the organization through progressive responsibilities.

Before WHP, Prachi was a member of the core team that established the Surya Clinic medical network of the Janani program in Bihar. She had progressive responsibilities to manage the integration of social franchising components into Janani’s mainline programming. She spearheaded special efforts targeting rural clients and the urban poor through a special community outreach. Prachi has also worked with BAIF, a noted development agency working in the areas of micro-credit and animal husbandry, and for Mother Dairy, which brought about the dairy revolution in India.

Shagun Sabarwal is the Associate Director of Policy and Training at J-PAL SA. She is also the Director of the CLEAR (Center for Learning on Evaluation and Results) SA center. Shagun leads J-PAL’s efforts to build partnerships with policymakers in the region and works with policymakers, J-PAL affiliated researchers and J-PAL SA staff to disseminate lessons from randomized evaluations and promote evidence-informed decision-making and scale-ups of successful social programs. As head of training Shagun also provides strategic oversight and leads the capacity building portfolio under CLEAR South Asia where she works on strengthening monitoring and evaluation capacity in the South Asia region.

Shagun has a doctoral degree in public health from Harvard University. Shagun has experience in working in research and evaluation on a range of topics including maternal and child health, violence against women and adolescent health.

Ganapathy Raju is an agricultural engineer from IIT Kharagpur and a post graduate in rural management from IRMA. He has over 30 years of experience in the field. He has ten years with Fairtrade International working from Bangalore, India. He has worked with producer groups and got them certified, stay certified in Fairtrade and also succeed in the same. His work has helped some of the producers in accessing global markets, access finance and built capacities in small producers to directly export.
Four of the producers whom he has supported have won awards constituted by Fairtrade International.

He created Gram Mooligai (village herbs) Co Limited out of his passion for community management of forest resources, during the early part of his career. This company was set up as a public limited company owned by medicinal plants gather women organised into self- help groups. The company is providing livelihood support to about 3000 gatherer families and have won awards.
His first decade of experience with VIKSAT, Ahmedabad laid a strong foundation in the area of community management of forests and water. About 10,000 ha of degraded forest restored in a tribal community through the action of people. Both the communities and the NGO was awarded for this work.

With a vision to enable livelihoods and enhance quality of life through Education, Employability and Entrepreneurship, Gayathri Vasudevan co-founded Labournet in 2006. She is a doctorate in Development Studies, with over 23 years of work in the development Sector. A research scholar on gender and labour issues, she spent early years of her career exploring rural India at the grass roots level that led her to experience firsthand the life and day-to- day challenges faced by people in villages. She worked at International Labour Organisation, United Nations technical institution for eight years before she started Labournet services India pvt.ltd.

Gayathri has held several advisory posts in the government and other private boards and, presently, is member of Tailoring Advisory Board-Raymond, CII - National Skills Committee, National Sports Committee, Periyar Technology Business Incubator (Periyar TBI). She has more than 30 publications in the areas of labour, employment and gender issues to her credit. She has won numerous awards in the last decade as a social entrepreneur for her exemplary work in labour issues and is one of 53 most Powerful Women in Business in India.

Saskia works with the DOEN foundation where she is a programme manager across the Green theme, mainly focused on social enterprises in general and sustainable energy. Prior to joining the DOEN Foundation, she worked in the social enterprise and impact investing sector in South and South East Asia. Saskia started her career in banking at ABN AMRO in the Netherlands and the Dutch Antilles. She has an LLM in Dutch, European and Comparative law and an MSc in Political Economy.

Kabir Vajpeyi, Co-Founder & Principal Architect, VINYÃS - Centre for Architectural Research & Design, Co-founder & CEO VINYÃS Society - Society for Research, Design, Capacity Building, Advocacy and Policy

Kabir Vajpeyi, an architect by qualification and an Ashoka Fellow, has created a framework to creatively use space and its built elements to make Aanganwadi and Elementary school architecture more conducive to child development and learning. By convincing various state and central governments in India to invest in his idea, he has established an effective delivery mechanism that brings engineers, teachers, and architects together to implement and spread his idea in government Aanganwadis and schools in urban and rural settings.

Kabir's work to develop physical space for holistic learning and child development has directly impacted more than 200,000 schools and 190,000 pre-schools, across 19 States and Union Territories in India and through intervention in the national policy framework, it potentially impacts 1.3 million Aanganwadis and similar number of Primary and Elementary schools.

Dr. Prince Mathew works as the Regional Head of operations for the Spanish section of MSF / Doctors without Borders in Asia, covering India, Thailand, China, Vietnam and Bangladesh. He is a medical doctor by training and has spent the last 6 years in different positions in MSF and currently takes the lead for emergency responses and the design, setup and access negotiations for projects in Asia.

Dr. Ajit Kanitkar is a Development Consultant working with the Tata Education and Development Trust for the last one year and currently a member of the research team at Vikasanvesh Foundation, an initiative supported by the Tata Trusts. Prior to this, he was Programme Officer at Ford Foundation, and Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, both in New Delhi and a faculty member at IRMA in Anand. His latest publication is a book “Gems of Purest Ray Serene: Glimpse into lives and work of India’s outstanding Social workers; edited by Sanjiv Phansalkar & Ajit Kanitkar, December 2017. He is also a visiting faculty with IIM-Udaipur and works with many NGOs in honorary capacity.

Dr Ravi Narayan ,is a community health physician , who moved beyond academia and research to initiate the Society for Community Health Awareness Research and Action, (SOCHARA) in the early 1990's to evolve a social and community paradigm of health beyond its bio-medical framework and explore ideas such as health as a social movement; communitzation; countervailing power; appropriate people oriented technology; plural health systems, values in health and health care; socio-epidemiology and SEPCE analysis etc. He is deeply involved and associated with Peoples Health Movement at a global and national level and has engaged with central and state ministries of Health, NRHM, Planning Commission, Karnataka Knowledge Commission, Public Health Foundation of India, BMJ, WHO- global and regional level, Global forum for health research- exploring and promoting these community health paradigms and stimulating creative responses and collective initiatives.

He is also associated and involved with the Global Health Watch; the International People Health University; the WHO advocacy in health through WHO-watch; and has inspired community health initiatives and networks at various levels. At present, he is a strong advocate of the following paradigms- Health is not medicine; Health is a public good: Health action includes action on the social, economic, political, cultural and ecological determinants; and Health needs community as people and participants and not only as clients, users or beneficiaries. And finally, Health is for All and not just for those who can pay.

U.S. Mahendar is an entrepreneur with 20 years of experience in the coffee industry. He is one of the founding members of the brand Hatti Kaapi. He comes from a Coffee grower’s family in Hassan. After completing his studies(under-graduation), he started his entrepreneurship journey in Coffee Trading. He started a small manufacturing unit in Bengaluru(2002), to process instant coffee premixes for Tata Coffee Ltd.

The dream and passion to drive filter coffee in the retail space made him to launch the first Hatti Kaapi café in Gandhi Bazar, South Bengaluru (2009) along with his childhood friend M L Gowda. Since then, the journey has grown strong in the Coffee Retail space. Over the last 9 years, Hatti Kaapi has built a strong presence in the domestic market with 66 Outlets in 3 states covering 5 cities. Hatti Kaapi has presence in high street commercial areas, corporates, international airports, metro station, hospitals and tech parks. Key enablers for this growth are quality, dynamism, valued pricing and personalized service.

He is a passionate leader with a long track record of many ventures. He has extensive knowledge and strong grounding in coffee business. He is an inspiring personality with a strong vision to give back to the society. In Hatti Kaapi, he drives his pet initiatives viz Senior Citizen’s Club and Special Hattians and Green practices (coffee ground and earthen pot). His vision is to make filter kaapi a global product.

Santosh Noronha obtained his B.Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras and subsequently a PhD in Biochemical Engineering. He was then employed as a postdoctoral fellow for several years at NIH, Bethesda. He has been at IIT Bombay since 2001.

He is a biochemical engineer by training who has evolved multidisciplinary interests. He has focused on understanding various metabolic and regulatory aspects of microbial systems, towards rationally improving the production of therapeutics. He coordinates development and deployment of Virtual Labs, an MHRD ICT project (vlabs.iitb.ac.in). He is also coordinator of the Healthcare Research Consortium at IIT Bombay, which interfaces with major hospitals and research labs in the Mumbai area, and is now actively engaged in translating several collaborative research efforts into technologies. More on these is available at healthcare-research.iitb.ac.in

Shrashtant Patara is an architect by training. He has been with the Development Alternatives Group since 1988, providing research expertise, management capability and strategic direction to teams working in the areas of Habitat, Renewable Energy, Water and Sanitation, Waste Recycling and Livelihood Support Systems.

His work is at the forefront of designing collaborative approaches to the resolution of complex problems and is aimed at promoting sustainable service delivery mechanisms that are directed towards local economic development, regeneration of the environment and greater social equity. Currently, Patara is responsible for the management of initiatives that promote entrepreneurship, create jobs and fulfill basic needs at scale. He is a Fellow of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Global Program on Social Innovation and a member of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction and Indo-German Expert Group on Green and Inclusive Economy.

Patara has been instrumental in the establishment of several social businesses within the DA Group, including TARA Machines and Tech Services and the TARA Livelihood Academy. He currently leads the team that is incubating “TARAurja”, a renewable energy based micro-utility business and the Indian Micro Enterprises Development Foundation.

Anjali Sastry is senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Her management science PhD in system dynamics and physics and Russian bachelor’s degrees are from MIT. She began as a management consultant at Bain & Company, then investigated electric end-use efficiency in India as research scholar at Rocky Mountain Institute and Lawrence Berkeley Lab before becoming assistant professor at the University of Michigan and MIT.

Systems thinking, organizational change, social impact, and learning are her passions. In 2007, Anjali developed Global Health Lab to find practical ways for front-line enterprises to improve scope, efficiency, and quality in frontier markets. Through 100 on-the-ground projects, she built lasting collaborations in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and elsewhere. Drawing on her grounding in system dynamics, her current work investigates how business models and organizational design enable the delivery of needed services and goods amid constraints.

Anjali serves on the Board of Directors of global nongovernmental organization Management Sciences for Health and educational non-profit ResearchILD. At MIT, she works with the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship and advises the Jameel World Education Lab and SOLVE, along with Harvard University’s Global Health Delivery Project. A former member of the Governing Body of the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum and advisor in residence to Tata Trusts on innovation and systems thinking, she is now founding advisor to a new company, shift7. Anjali shares her work widely. Her book Parenting Your Child with Autism: Practical Solutions, Strategies, and Advice (New Harbinger) pairs personal experience with research. Fail Better: Design Smart Mistakes and Succeed Sooner (HBS Press), is a guide to orchestrating learning in the workplace.

Romana Shaikh – Director, Training & Impact, Teach For India

Romana holds a Bachelors degree in Psychology from St. Xavier’s, Mumbai & has been a Teach For India Fellow in its first cohort of 2009. During the 2 years of her Fellowship, she came to deeply believe that teaching really is leadership and this led her to join the Training & Impact team straight after graduating from the program.

Romana has designed the Literacy Curriculum & Assessment, led the development of the Leadership Framework for the Fellowship and is working to establish a stronger impact evaluation for the program. She is excited to strengthen the program and continue to build leaders that will be advocates and strive for equity in education and give all children the excellent education they deserve.

Dr Prabir Chatterjee is the Executive Director at the State Health Resource Centre, Chhatisgarh. He has over 30 years of work experience in the public health sector working with various organizations and has published numerous papers as well. His past experience includes working with IMA GFATM Project on Private Public Mix, UNICEF, SMO NPSP (WHO- GoI Godda) Jharkhand, Community Rehabilitation Project for Children, Pakur, SKGUS Memari (Burdwan) in West Bengal and at the Centre for Rural Health and Social Education, Tirupattur (North Arcot), Tamil Nadu.

Liby Johnson is Executive Director of Gram Vikas, a non-government development organisation working with rural and tribal communities in Odisha since 1979. He is a Rural Management professional with 20+ years' experience of grassroots and policy level work in areas of livelihoods, enterprise promotion and organisational development, in both the government and non-government sectors. He spent the first half of his career on ground in Bihar, Jharkhand, Odisha and Tamilnadu with rural communities on securing better livelihoods, coping with natural disasters, habitat development, alternate energy and organisational development. Following this, he worked with the Kudumbashree- the Poverty Eradication Mission of the Government of Kerala in Kerala in areas of micro enterprises and urban poverty alleviation and as COO of Kudumbashree-National Resource Organization supporting in the implementation of the National Rural Livelihoods Mission in 10 States of India. Liby has also worked with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) as an Expert in Entrepreneurship Promotion. Liby is a graduate of the Institute of Rural Management, Anand, Gujarat.

G.Gautama was Principal of The School, KFI from 1991 to 2009, where he guided several initiatives such as Mixed Age Group Learning in Junior and Middle school, a dynamic wide learning programme for High School students and establishing a short term Teacher Training programme. The attempts of TN SSA to change the pedagogy in 16500 Govt Upper Primary schools towards Active Learning Methodologies were a actively facilitated by practicing teachers of The School, who had just begun the shift to Mixed Age Group environment, a move proposed and spearheaded by Gautama in 2006.

The core of his work has been to facilitate the building of a robust and sustainable staff culture through which initiative and change can emerge in an educational institution.

Exploring if human beings in working together can do better than the sum of their weaknesses, Can intelligent decisions be made consistently by individuals and groups, teams and what it takes to do this, are questions that have concerned him. He steered the launching of the new residential KFI school Pathashaala (near Thirukalukundram). Pathashaala chose solar lighting and dry composting toilets as the environmentally necessary and sensible choices for the campus at inception. The lifestyle choices made at this zero black water campus are seen by young and old as sensible, valuable and viable. 
He serves as Director-Secretary since 2012 of the Palar Centre for Learning (PCFL - KFI) comprising Pathashaala school, Outreach programs and a Krishnamurti study centre.

Mr. Piyush Mathur is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Simpa Networks, an award-winning energy access company, using innovative packaged finance models to make energy accessible and affordable for the energy-poor households in rural India. Under Mr Mathur’s leadership, Simpa has created innovative financing structures to make solar energy affordable and accessible to rural energy-poor households and shops in rural India. Simpa is now expanding its footprint in existing and new districts across India. The path-breaking model established by Simpa marrying Fintech with Cleantech, is not only changing the lives of people in India but opening up possibilities for making distributed clean energy available to people around the world leapfrogging conventional energy solutions.

Mr Mathur was previously a private equity and corporate finance professional with experience in Investments, Cross-Border M&A and Capital Raisings. Immediately before Simpa, Mr Mathur was a Director at Kleinwort Benson Bank in London where he established and led the Principal Investments business. During this time, Mr Mathur led investments in the renewable energy space ranging from distributed micro power to utility-scale solar mini-grids in Europe. Mr Mathur also invested in emerging market development businesses e.g. a sustainable agro-forestry and fisheries business in West Africa, demonstrating how commercial investments can be structured for developmental businesses operating in high country-risk regions.

Earlier, Mr Mathur was a partner in a private equity firm based out of London, where he originated, invested and managed a number of investments in high-growth cleantech and TMT businesses, several of which established themselves as category leaders. Prior to that, Mr Mathur was at KPMG where he advised global corporations on acquisitions in US, Europe and India.

Mr Mathur has also worked in Strategy Consulting with Charles River Associates where he advised the Board of BP on reconfiguring their Alternative Energy portfolio to attract external capital.

Mr Mathur is a proud alumnus of Apeejay Noida. He is a qualified Chartered Accountant and has received MBA from London Business School.

Robert Stoner is the Deputy Director for Science and Technology of the MIT Energy Initiative, and Founding Director of the Tata Center for Technology and Design. He currently serves on the Science and Technology Committee of the Alliance for Sustainable Energy which oversees the National Renewable Energy Lab, and is member of the board of directors of the Tata Center at IIT-Bombay. His current research interests include energy technology and policy for developing countries, and design for resource constrained settings.

Dr. Stoner has worked extensively in academia and industry throughout his career. He is the inventor of numerous optical measurement and computational techniques, and has built and managed successful technology startups in the semiconductor, IT and optics industries. From 2007 through 2009 he lived and worked in Africa and India while serving in a variety of senior roles within the Clinton Foundation.

He earned his Bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from Queen’s University, and his Ph.D. from Brown University in condensed matter physics.

Malathi Krishnamurthy Holla is an International para athlete from India. She was awarded Arjuna award and Padma Shri for her achievements. Having won over 300 medals Malathi was conferred the prestigious Arjuna and Padma Shri awards. She represented India in the Paralympics held in South Korea, Barcelona, Athens and Beijing; the Asian Games held in Beijing, Bangkok, South Korea and Kuala Lumpur; World Masters held in Denmark and Australia, Commonwealth Games in Australia and Open Championships in Belgium, Kuala Lumpur and England.

Incapacitated by Polio at age of one and confined to the wheelchair after undergoing 33 surgeries, Malathi was driven by courage and a will to achieve and a diehard persevering philosophy that moved her to phenomenal personal and professional success that would have made most achievers proud!

Malathi also worked as a Manager in Syndicate Bank and now shelters children with various disabilities at Mathru Foundation — a charitable trust formed along with her friends. She focuses mainly on polio victims from rural areas, whose parents cannot afford to send their child to school or provide medical treatment.

Poonam kathuria is the founder and director of SWATI (Society for Women’s Action and Training Initiatives) an organization that works at state and national levels on issues related to violence against women, adolescent and women’s health, Women’s access and right to land and governance (http://www.swati.org.in). Poonam has over 20 years of experience in a leadership role working for prevention of gender based violence , women’s empowerment & leadership . Her skills range from project design and management to situation analysis, action research and capacity development. Under her leadership SWATI has grown geographically and programmatically and is known for its analytical and innovative approaches to complex issues.

Poonam is the founder member of several Networks including the Working group for Women and Land Rights . She has been invited to carry out research, capacity building, assessment and strategy formulation exercises by Aga Khan Foundation, Sir Dorabji Tata Trust, MaCarthur Foundation , Mahila Samakhya Society, International Center for Research on Women among others.

A holistic and cross-sector approach to responding to the complex nature of development challenges has been central to her work. She bridges the divide between practitioners and academia. Poonam was awarded the Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor ship for 2014 at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and taught a special course at the university of Toronto during the period 2014 June to September 2014.

Her latest work is a study on shelter homes in Gujarat and she has co-edited as well as written a chapter in the forthcoming ‘ From A Feminist Lens - Women’s Voices, Mode Of Campaigning And Non-Violent Ways Of Resistance’being published by Zubaan- http://www.zubaanbooks.com

Gauri Singh is presently working as the Principal Secretary, Govt of MP in the Health sector for the last 3 years. Her role calls for providing direction, policy support and strategic inputs to improve the quality of implementation of health sector initiatives, policies and programmes. As a career bureaucrat, she has played a leadership role in helping set up a new multilateral agency (IRENA) between 2011-2014, implemented country level policies and infrastructure programs for the Government of India, directed projects lending at the national and state level, and run large World Bank funded development projects. Her roles have included working as the Joint Secretary, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Government of India, Managing Director, MP State Financial Corporation, and Director on the Board of Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI).

Prior to these pivotal roles, the first 15 years of her career (1989-2004) were spent implementing grass roots development programs. This included being the Project Coordinator of the main poverty alleviation project of Government of Madhya Pradesh covering 2400 villages and funded by the World Bank; Mission Director for the Rajiv Gandhi Watershed Management Mission, the largest watershed program in India; and Managing Director, MP Fisheries Development Corporation.

Dhruv Lakra has a strong background in the social impact and finance space. He started his career in investment banking at Merrill Lynch and shifted to the social sector after the devastating Asian tsunami of 2004. While living with the fishing community for four months, he found his true calling and decided to work in the social sector. He has helped many social organisations scale impact through their programmes and strategic planning. Dhruv completed his postgraduate diploma in Social Enterprise Management from SIES College, New Mumbai, where he was awarded ‘The Most Enterprising Student.’

After working for two years in this sector he went on to pursue his MBA on a full Skoll Scholarship at Saïd Business School with the intention of going back to India.

After Oxford, Dhruv founded Mirakle Couriers in Mumbai, which is a for-profit courier service that employs low-income deaf adults. The deliveries are done by deaf men, and the back office is run by deaf women. For his innovative work with the deaf at Mirakle Couriers, Dhruv has been awarded the National Award from the President of India, the Helen Keller Award, the prestigious Echoing Green Fellowship based in New York, and the highest civilian award from the Jammu and Kashmir government. More recently he has been awarded the prestigious International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) for 2018 from the United States Government.

Thomas Pullenkav has more than 24 years of experience in the domains of clean energy access, sustainable development and energy poverty. His expertise lies in the off-grid energy sector, with extensive ground level experience in deploying last mile energy solutions for the poor. Thomas is currently serving as the director of SELCO Solar Private Limited a social enterprise that provides energy solutions to under- served households and businesses and is a senior advisor at SELCO Foundation - the not-for- profit arm of the SELCO group of organisations. He also works as an independent consultant providing advisory support to organizations in the sustainable energy and low carbon development sectors.

Thomas was one of the founding member of the team that started SELCO Solar Light Private Limited and he served the organisation in various capacities for more than 13 years. Prior to this, he worked with TATA BP Solar India Limited (now TATA Power Solar Systems Ltd.) and the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB).

Thomas is an alumnus of the prestigious Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA). Thomas has been involved in the incubation of social enterprises in his capacity as Team Leader of the Villgro Innovation Foundation’s Energy Entrepreneurship Incubation Initiative and more recently as Advisor of the SELCO Incubation programme.

Nilesh is a professional grounded in social development with a spanning career of a decade and half in Community and partnership development, Strategic planning and monitoring. He holds a management in development sector from SPJIMR, India and is an equipped fellow from Centre for Creative Leadership, Atlanta for Leadership Development. Currently, he is with Habitat for Humanity India focusing on housing and integrated programs in the country and prior to joining to Habitat India, he was with World Vision India for 7 years. He has first-hand experience in family owned construction firm in Mumbai. He was an agent for driving the change management process while solving problems and dealing with interconnected systems & departments in the organisation. He enjoys mentoring and coaching to young development professionals in the sector. Building partnerships and a network of supportive leaders in the development sector is the core area of interest.

Ashwin Naik is an entrepreneur/advisor with interests in healthcare delivery, social enterprise and tech enabled health startups. Ashwin is the Founder of Vaatsalya Healthcare, an award winning social enterprise, which was the first network of hospitals focused exclusively on Tier II and Tier III towns in India. Vaatsalya has been recognized globally as winner of the Inaugural Porter Prize in India for value based healthcare, the Most Innovative Healthcare Company by VCCircle in 2014 and India’s top 10 innovative companies by Fast Company in 2013 among many other recognitions.

Previously, he was the Vice President of Business Development and Informatics at Triesta Sciences, a clinical genomics company. Ashwin has been part of the human and mouse genome projects at Celera Genomics.

Shri Vishwanath Giriraj retired as Additional Chief Secretary (Finance) Government of Maharashtra in October 2017 after thirty two years in the Indian Administrative Service. Earlier, he has served as Principal Secretary, Rural Development and Panchayati Raj, and Secretary, Water Conservation and Employment Guarantee Schemes, Government of Maharashtra. He has also worked in the Khadi and Village Industries Commission. His field assignments in Maharashtra include Collector, Yavatmal District, Additional Collector, Pune, Chief Executive Officer, Zilla Parishad - Chandrapur, and Additional Tribal Commissioner.

Mr. Giriraj has been working for the development of the bamboo sector for last twenty-five years both in his personal and official capacity. He drafted the first Action Plan for the Bamboo sector which was sponsored by the Ministry of Environment and Forests in 1999. He was a Member of the National Mission for Bamboo Applications. Recently he was Chairman of a Committee which prepared a road map for strengthening the bamboo sector in Maharashtra. His areas of interest include rural development, rural non-form sector, watershed development and related areas. Mr Giriraj is a graduate in Commerce from Loyola College, Chennai and a Graduate in Law from Mumbai University.

Krishna C Rao is a trained development expert with an academic background in international development and non-profit management and bachelors in chemical engineering. Krishna is a researcher at International Water Management Institute (IWMI) and has more than 15 years of experience working in developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America on provision of infrastructure service and specifically on sanitation service such as solid and liquid waste management. At IWMI, Krishna has been responsible for developing business models for Resource Recovery and Reuse program, assessing their feasibility using multi-criteria assessment in multiple cities in developing countries. His key research area focus is on developing solutions for fecal sludge management (FSM) and grey water management. His primary geographical focus in IWMI is South Asia where he has been working on multiple projects advising governments and developing solutions to improve solid and liquid waste management and setting up of fecal sludge treatment plants specifically incorporating reuse.

Over the past seven years at Dasra, Pakzan has lead and grown Dasra’s research efforts on issues such as adolescent empowerment, health, education, governance, sanitation, and human rights. She has played a key role in engaging several partners such as Bank of America, British Telecom, USAID, GIZ, Kiawah Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Shelter Associates, and Naz Foundation, among others. Currently, Pakzan engages with philanthropists and foundations to help direct financial and non-financial support to address some of India’s most significant development challenges as well as leads the Office of Strategy Management at Dasra. Before joining Dasra, she worked at the Akanksha Foundation in Mumbai where she designed curriculum, planned community development programs and devised impact indicators. Pakzan has a Master’s in Business Administration with honors from S.P Jain Center of Management and a Bachelor’s in Management Studies with honors from the University of Mumbai.

Huda Jaffer is a product/-service/-system’s designer with a keen interest in user centric design specifically for sustainability and developmental issues. She has been critical in building the necessary processes of SELCO Foundation that has led to it being known as a pioneer in the field of building the ecosystem for sustainable energy access for the poor.

Dr. Sankar Datta is an Indian academic and professional development worker. He has been engaged in rural livelihood promotion and support activities for more than three decades since the early 1980s. He was in-charge of operations while setting up the BASIX group of Companies, a new generation livelihood support institution. He has also been an ex-member of the Working Group of the Planning Commission for the 12th Five Year Plan.

Rachita Misra works as a Senior Program Manager in SELCO Foundation. With a background in architecture and regional planning, she brings in over six years of experience in designing models and programs that aim to reduce uneven access to resources. SELCO Foundation was started in 2010 as an open source platform to create solutions linking sustainable energy to poverty eradication.

Shikha works to explore the right opportunities for Janaadhar and works with stakeholders within and outside the organization to ensure that the business and regulatory landscape continues to be conducive for ecosystem development. Janaadhar is the only pure play affordable housing developer in India, in the process of delivering over 2000 PMAY compliant affordable houses in Karnataka, Gujarat and Maharashtra.

Dr. Yogesh Jadeja has done extensive work in hydrogeology mapping, groundwater management in arid and semi arid parts of India. Since 1993, he has been working with the not for profi t development sector in India towards the broader goal of strengthening livelihoods in water scarce and marginal environments. He founded ACT in 2003 primarily to pursue his goal, and was one of the working group members for 12th fi ve-year planning on sustainable groundwater management.

Sasanka has 15 years of professional experience, of which, the last six years have been in the sanitation sector. He has done important work in extending the application of low-energy Sewage Treatment Plants in India improving their acceptability in the market. His entrepreneurial venture has helped prove economic models in Solid Waste Management and influenced policy in the state of Andhra Pradesh

Amala Akkineni is the co-founder of Blue Cross of Hyderabad, a registered non-profi t animal welfare organization working for the welfare of animals in Hyderabad and extending support to other groups in the state of Andhra Pradesh. Amala has worked for the last 18 years in South India through various non-governmental and governmental organizations in animal welfare, wildlife protection, child welfare, rural women’s empowerment, HIV awareness, and for the protection of the environment. As a celebrated film actress, she has worked in 50 films and uses the medium to bring social and environmental issues into focus.