Ashok Khosla

The status of a senior fellow of Ashoka Foundation comes as yet another feather in the cap of Ashok Khosla, president of Development Alternatives. A Cambridge graduate, Khosla, has advised agencies like the WEF, WWF, World Bank and UNDP.

Khosla, who set up Development Alternatives in 1983, an organisation working to creating sustainable livelihoods, feels social entrepreneurship is a matter of attitude. ?Social enterprise is all about making various initiatives sustainable. For example, it?s about getting people plant trees, which bear fruit, selling them and generating income out of it,? says Khosla.

Development Alternatives has worked towards implementation of the UK-funded Rs 192 crore Poorest Areas Civil Society programme, which undertook development initiatives in 192 poorest districts in the country. Three Taragrams set up by Development Alternatives have come up as a lifeline for 115 villages of the Bundelkhand region, which has been drought stricken for over last seven years.

However, the lower rate of scaling up of development initiatives is one of the issues the social sector has to deal with. ?No matter how much you believe in free market, you cannot expect corporates to tackle issues related to poverty,? says Khosla. He adds, ?NGOs are doing it but are not able to scale it up since they do not have the funds required to take up large scale initiatives. They have limited resources.? It is here that the social enterprise comes into play. ?The purpose of social enterprise is to create that source,? he adds.

Dr Devi Shetty

What does it take a doctor to turn a social worker? Well, if your patient has been Mother Teresa herself, the possibility is high. Such was the case with Dr Devi Shetty of Narayana Hrudyalaya, in Bangalore.

And now, owing to his social initiative, he has been made a senior fellow by the Ashoka Foundation. The UK trained cardiac surgeon says, ?It has been our constant effort to bring cardiac healthcare to the common man through our micro health insurance programme Yashasvni. Being recognised for something you are doing is a great feeling.?

Yashasvni became the first micro health insurance programme to be launched in this country seven years ago. ?We started with 1.7 million farmers and are now reaching out to 3 million. Initially, they were paying a premium of Rs 5 a month. The scheme provides BPL population access to over 3,000 network hospitals in the state,? says Shetty.

Talking about his scaling up plans, Shetty says, ?We want the state governments to launch health insurance schemes. We are setting up our facilities in West Bengal, Rajasthan and Jamshedpur and are sensitising the state governments on issues relating to inclusive healthcare.?

While schemes like these are certainly a step in the right direction, the large-scale corporatisation of the healthcare sector has created a wide mismatch in terms of delivery of services. Shetty attributes it to the shortage of specialists in the country. ?We produce 30,000 doctors. Only 9% of them become specialists. We need to allow all the doctors to become specialists. Today, the private hospitals corner the specialists. There is a need to increase the number of PG seats to UG seats. We have created artificial shortage in production of specialists,? he said.

Apart from the micro insurance initiative, Narayana Hrudyalaya gets over 3,000 ECGs done online per day from rural areas and medical advice is given immediately. The use of IT for medical inclusion, if scaled up, would be a boon for millions living without medicare facilities.

Gijs Spoor

Gijs Spoor took a liking to India at a tender age of eight while watching a documentary prepared by his parents. So much so that the 32-year old has now made India a second home, and has dedicated himself to the country.

The cause being integrating the small and marginalised cotton growers of Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra with the global textile supply chain. Three years after he set up Zameen Organic, which helps farmers raise their crops using organic standards, Spoor has been recognised as a Ashoka fellow.

Zameen forms a vital link between a large number of companies and the small farmer owned enterprises. ?We have been mobilising small farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra and helping them to access the global markets, which means global textile markets,? says Spoor.

Besides, Spoor is serving a UK supply chain on fair trade issues. ?Fair trade is a system of trade in which small farmers get guaranteed income apart from additional funds to invest in development. Around 6,000 quintals of cotton by 600 farmers have been exported in 2008-09. The village development portion is left for the villagers. It is they who decide about their priorities,? he says.

Spoor feels there is a huge potential in the network of social entrepreneurs. ?There has been always a stalemate between the government, civil society, and corporates. When we talk about development, all of them claim that they are the most powerful agents of change. But the main problem is about cultural barriers. They speak in different languages. A social entrepreneur talks in all the languages. On one hand we are corporates, but on the other hand we have goals similar as governments and NGOs,? says he.

Kaushlendra

When 27-year-old Kaushlendra, an MBA from IIM- Ahmedabad, decided to leave the plush corporate world and take up the cause of poor farmers in Bihar, he would have least imagined that the initiative would make him a global name to reckon with. His efforts to empower the farmers in Bihar and free them from the shackles of the middlemen through his initiative Samriddhi have caught the attention of the Ashoka Foundation, which has made him a fellow.

Samriddhi is a home delivery services for vegetable introduced in Patna. All it takes a customer is to dial a number, place the order, and get fresh vegetables delivered at pre-specified rate. The delivery is done by sales executive, erstwhile vendors, who are paid fixed as well as variable salary. While Kaushlendra is too modest to talk about his success, a sales associate says, ?Our costs on all the vegetables are Rs 1 or Rs 2 lesser than what one would get in the market. And you also get fresh vegetables.?