Friday, January 4, 2008

Social Enterpreneurship

The concept has attaracted me since the time i have heard of it. I like to work for people, understanding their issues, getting innovative ideas out of their brain and enabling them by inspiring to make their ideas a reality. When i first sat on last bench of one of the SE seminars, i dint know i was going to be so much in synch with it. Imagine working on something which makes life easy for millions and employ millions.
The ability to reestablish Dharavi, by selling some innovative better cheap to construct houses in a public , private partnership model could be one such idea. We, a group of four people, picked up idea of promoting rural development, since we had no money to start with, we started with easiest. Tourism. Just take the people to the REAL India and charge them to showcase the same. The money creates a pool, which gets reinvested in making villages better. When villages get better and you understand the problems, prioritize them, attract NGOs and put them to work on identified problems. (Trust me there are many NGOs busy attarcting funds, but they dont know what to do with the fund, but for paying themselves. So, put them to work, dont create a new NGO.)
Everything developed from a word on paper. The more we get on ground, ideas hit and expand. If i think of this idea today, i can say that if i am able to give it 100% of time, this has potential to earn millions for millions on ground, and every success in this direction will make my "India Shining". Whats magical about it is the fact, " We teach people to catch fish, we dont give them fish to eat."
Papa always told me that life is about giving the right thing to right people at right time. Anything that comes for free, gets consumed for free. So, if you really want to do good, enable, dont sympathize.
I feel social enterpreneurship is exactly what he meant. While the words at that age were like fables and fairy tales, its fun that i doscover his vision in everything i do today and they are not fairy tales anymore, its a reality. :)

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