Next Wealth by Dr Sridhar Mitta

Time flies by!.

It's already a month since we met for Dr.Sridhar Mitta's talk on Next Wealth, his initiative on Social Entrepreneurship.Dr. Mitta walked us through the path on how a profitable venture can be run along with the considerations for social need.

The Vision for Next Wealth is multiple social ventures, with the characteristics of , Social, Profit,Technology,Scalable and Replicable.

Dr. Mitta sighted a couple of examples, the first one is the example of a blood bank in Vellore. In four years of it's existance it hasn't shown much growth. Next Wealth has taken upon itself to transform this into a profitable venture. They are working on employing IT for better service, cell phone search for donors, providing health reports to donors and others are a part of this attempt. They are also working on converting blood into red blood cells, platlets, plasma etc, so as to maximize the donor-receiver ratio. The plan is to grow from serving 100 patients per month to about 5000 patients a month,all this while being financially viable at the same time.

The other example he gave was on rural job creation. 6-7k per month is a good amount for graduates in rural areas, for them not to move to a city. Next Wealth identified a few centers near Salem, Hubli, Chittor etc, to setup these centers. The criteria a center has to meet are
  • Center is to be setup in a rural area.
  • The center to have about 150 people. Anything less will mean its not financially viable, anything more logistics become a concern.
  • Type of work handled at a center should be simple well defined process(not some 20 different things at a center).
  • Local entrepreneurs should manage these centers, with help from their unrban teams.
  • Investments for the center also to come from the local area, this is to help replication and growth.
  • The skills required from people should be completley available in the area.
  • Bandwidth, Power etc. to be available reliably
What we see here is a paradigm shift from setting up a large center to large number of small centers.The goal is to setup 50 centers employing 10K people, all this without any donations, grants, and interventions from government. Another big barrier is how to convince the CEO's of firms that the above is a viable proposition. They would not believe it, but if given the picture of "$/hr", then things look very different. At $2 per hour, a lot things which look impossible today become a possibility.

There was a Q&A sessiong at the end of his talk, followed by introduction of 2009,2008 batch passouts who are presently in Bangalore. Kimi anounced to the audience that, one of our alumni Mr. Shankar Maruwada is part of the UID project, headed by Mr. Nandan Nilekani.

We broke for networking and dinner post this.It was a great time with about 35 of the alumni present.

We are again meeting on 12th September(Saturday) at 5:30 Pm. This time we have Mr.Anal Jain presenting on "Microfinance- A solution to poverty in India?".

Venue
Indiranagar Club. 9th Main, 4th Cross, HAL II Stage. Click here for google maps link.

Sponsor Krishnaraj Venkatraman(Kimi) - Hungry Bangalore

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