Use Internet to ramp up social entrepreneurship reach: expert

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Jamshedpur: The social sector movement in India should take lessons from Obama's recent internet campaign in the United States to move ahead speedily.

Sushmita Ghosh, president emeritus of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, an organisation that supports social entrepreneurship, was present at the inauguration here on Saturday of the two-day 1st national conference on social entrepreneurship---Providing Access for Sustainable Development---organised by XLRI.

Ghosh said ventures in the social sector in the country should lend themselves to continuous growth; the way e-mail and search engine Google were thrown open to everyone across the globe.

"How do we fast-track the social movement? How do we get users to regulate, organise and multiply themselves?" said Ghosh. She said the internet was all about scaling up, something which social platforms should lend themselves to.

Ghosh said that while the social sector in the West was looking increasingly at the Internet for growth, India too had by using the internet a huge opportunity to actually leapfrog from 'incremental growth' to 'monumental and limitless' growth.

"We could either replicate everything that anyone else has done or skip all that and get to a whole new level." Madhukar Shukla, the social entrepreneurship conference coordinator and XLRI professor of organisational behaviour and strategic management, said social entrepreneurs create wealth for the wider society, including social and environmental wealth, besides financial wealth for themselves. The conference, the first of its kind in the country, is being attended by around 150 development sector professionals (social entrepreneurs, NGOs, government agencies, corporate CSR executives, and academics).