Anantha Badu’s father died when he was young. He now stays with his mother and nine siblings near Puri, Orissa. Getting even one square meal a day can be a herculean task. Yet, Anantha wants to continue going to school and become an engineer, for which he needs a good diet to keep his brain ticking. Fortunately, his school provides him a proper meal.
Anantha’s is not a lone case. Around 1.3 million such children in about 7,700 government and government-aided schools as well as anganwadis (day-care centres) across eight states in India with similar dreams are being given a nutritious diet daily by the Akshaya Patra Foundation — a Bangalore-based trust. Around 60 per cent of the funds are given by the Indian government as part of the Centre’s mid-day meal scheme, while the rest is generated through donations from India and abroad.
Gururaj Deshpande — who was appointed co-chairman of US President Barack Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation & Entrepreneurship in June 2010 (the only India-born member in the council) — can cite many such cases. He should know, since he has been helping to raise money for the Akshaya Patra scheme from the US and is currently chairman of its US office.
Popularly known as ‘Desh’, he terms his work with Akshay Patra a ‘social innovation sandbox’ — one of the 60-odd projects in India governed by the Deshpande Foundation, created by Desh and wife Jaishree (sister of Sudha Murthy, wife of Infosys Technologies founder Narayana Murthy).
“Over the last 10 years, I have been spending around half my time with my profit ventures. The remaining time is spent on philanthropy.” He has five businesses — Sandstone Capital, Sycamore Networks, A123 Systems, HiveFire and Tejas Networks — of which he is chairman. He has also invested in Airvana Inc and is a life member of MIT Corporation, the board of trustees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The India sandbox comprises five districts — Belgaum: Dharwad, Gadag, Haveri, and Uttar Kannada, all in Karnataka — which are home to about 10 million people. “In India, my social entrepreneurship sandbox venture is making good progress. Being an organisation that helps (around 60) NGOs incubate ideas near Hubli, the idea is to create a sort of mini Silicon Valley. Ten young men from the US, as well as students from MIT and Brooklyn University, visit these places to incubate the ideas. We then plan to scale up these ventures by using a profit model.
Some of the projects his foundation supports include Agastya “whose mission is to spark curiosity and creativity among vulnerable and disadvantaged children, through hands-on science education. Around 700,000 kids have participated in this programme to date. We are targeting seven million kids in three years”.
Another project includes training marginal and small farmers — who often lack modern agricultural knowledge that could quickly and easily improve their productivity levels and enhance their livelihoods — by utilising low-cost technologies such as handycams, projectors, TVs and DVD players. It’s called the Digital Green project. Farmers are motivated by the fact that a peer from their village has already adopted agricultural practices depicted in the videos; this becomes a reason some other farmers choose to adopt them.
Deshpande left India in 1973 with just $8 in his pocket. “That was all the Indian government allowed you to carry to the US those days,” he recalls.
He has come a long way since and both he and his wife have tried to find ways to “give back to society”. Desh also discusses ideas with brother-in-law Narayana Murthy. “We meet at least six times a year. In fact, we’re working on a programme wherein 30 faculty members from the US are training engineers in India to improve the quality of engineering education in the country.”
“All innovation is contextual and solutions need to be provided for demands from the real world. Innovation and relevance results in impact,” he reiterates.
