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India Inc is helping social startups get business savvy

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India Inc is helping social startups get business savvyOne might mistake 58-year-old Dapu Khan for a small-time Rajasthani folk artist. And in some ways, that’s what he was till three years ago. Khan had played the kamaicha — one of the world’s oldest bowed instruments — at the entrance of Jaisalmer fort for most of his life.

Then, a few years ago, two graduates of the Berklee School of Music, Abhinav Agrawal and Satyam Sangwan and lawyer Shuchi Roy entered his life.

Using a portable multi-track-mixing studio that they designed, they recorded Khan’s music in Jaisalmer, helped him set up a website, framed music contracts, equipped him with business cards, and provided English translations of his songs. Khan has since performed across India, and in Germany and the US.

The three friends run Anahad Foundation, a non-profit that aims to preserve Indian folk music, and bring it to contemporary audiences. “We have created a platform where artists can become independent and get employment on their own. We have around 122 artists in 25 groups, and have helped them create 50 music videos. For some, incomes have gone up seven times,” says Agrawal.

With no revenue and plenty of costs, an initiative like Anahad would normally have remained a local one. But Anahad is thinking big. They started in Jaisalmer, but are looking to expand to Punjab, Jharkhand, and Chhattisgarh.

Non-profits are able to do this because the funding environment for them has changed dramatically in recent years. There’s a flood of corporate money because of the 2014 government mandate to spend 2% of profits on CSR activities. And there are substantial resources coming in from the family funds of India’s new billionaires.

This has generated interest in creating and accelerating innovative non-profits. Last year saw the emergence of non-profit incubators in India — N/Core, founded by former InMobi executive Atul Satija and supported by a host of corporates; Edumentum, founded by Infosys co-founder S D Shibulal and former Infosys top executive Sanjay Purohit; and Social Ventures Incubator of IIM-Bangalore’s NS Raghavan Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning (NSRCEL).

The incubators provide funding, network access and, most importantly, mentorship that enables non-profits to build scalable models.

“Corporates have started actively spending time with incubatees, helping them create business models and get funds. CEOs of established startups like Naveen Tewari of InMobi and Binny Bansal of Flipkart speak at our programmes,” says Satija, whose N/Core just graduated its first batch, which included Anahad.

Purohit says the non-profit sector is getting innovation funding – capital needed for entrepreneurs to try things out. Earlier, funders would demand proof of solid work, making it difficult for new entrants.

Aparna Sanjay, who heads Social Ventures Incubator, says family foundations, such as those of Azim Premji, Nandan Nilekani, and N R Narayana Murthy, want to back change in society, and the government too has a variety of schemes. This incubator’s first batch was funded by Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and is focused on transforming the lives of poor children in urban areas, primarily through education and skilling.

Going by the applications to the incubator programmes, the interest levels are phenomenal. N/Core received 1,032 applications for its 10 incubator slots. Social Ventures Incubator, which does a rigorous 18-month programme, received over 200 applications for eight slots.

The quality of talent entering the space is as high, and is mostly young. “These are the post-liberalisation kids who are graduating. They are optimistic, their families have made money, they feel secure, so they say ‘Let me do something that gives me satisfaction’,” says Satija. The applicants to N/Core’s programme included graduates from the IITs, IIMs, ISB, JNU, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, NUS Singapore, and Oxford.

Samuel Rajkumar’s Foundation for Environmental Monitoring, which is backed by Tata Trusts’ social entrepreneurship initiative Social Alpha, has developed a water and soil test kit that uses a smartphone camera and flash to detect contaminants at a fraction of the cost of using traditional lab equipment. This is being distributed across a number of states.

India Inc is helping social startups get business savvy FFEM’s mobile water test kit in action

Abhishek Gupta and Rishabh Verma’s NavGurugul is helping slum and rural children become software engineers with a one-year residential programme, and they are making it scalable by delivering the curriculum on a tech platform and getting the students to self-manage the programme.

For many, the biggest challenge is building trust among communities. That’s the problem Sukhibhava faced when it tried to reach out to rural women to create awareness about menstrual hygiene in 2014. “We saw 70% attrition when the women realised we weren’t providing free products, and were only giving lectures,” says co-founder Dilip Pattubala.

They changed their approach, identified those who could be community workers, and introduced games and health tests. “Today, there are community workers who talk about menstruation to 300-500 other women,” he says.

Satija says founders are driven by a sense of compassion, but haven’t thought through the problems — how to build for the long term, how to sell, how to raise funds, and more. These are the issues incubators help with. “We bring a business-oriented approach to non-profits,” says NSRCEL’s Aparna Sanjay.



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