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'Social Entrepreneur of the Year', India 2006—Profiles of the Awardee and Finalists
Vikram Akula—SKS Microfinance Private Limited
Vikram Akula was born in Hyderabad and moved to the US when he was only 3 years old. He witnessed India’s poverty on numerous family visits to India and made a promise to himself to do something to eradicate poverty. Vikram has over a decade of work and research experience in microfinance and is a former management consultant with McKinsey & Company. He was a Fulbright Scholar in India, during which he coordinated an action-research project on providing micro-credit for food security.
Amitabha Sadangi—International Development Enterprises India (IDEI)
Amitabha Sadangi was born in a village in Orissa in a family that earned less than 20 cents a day. He witnessed wide-spread hunger and saw communities around him breaking up because men had to migrate in distress to seek construction labor. Influenced by these early experiences, he set off on the trajectory of developing income generating programs for the rural poor.
Rama and Padmanabha Rao—RIVER
Rama and Padmanabha Rao—both with master’s and postgraduate degrees in education—joined Rishi Valley as teachers in 1987. By then they had experience in working with marginalzied communities in the Telengana district to improve education for the underprivileged. In 1987, they joined the Rishi Valley school primarily to lead and develop the Rishi Valley education outreach program, which evolved into RIVER. Since 1988, they have been jointly in charge of the centre.
Dr. S. Rajagopalan and Svati Bhogle—Technology Informatics Design Endeavour (TIDE)
Dr. S. Rajagopalan is an alumni of IIT Delhi and also holds a management degree from IIM Bangalore. His father was a post master and he spent his early years in villages. His belief that introduction of appropriate and ecological sound technologies can mitigate the poverty, unemployment and backwardness in villages, led him to join the Karnataka State Council for Science and Technology (KSCST). This government institute focused on development of rural innovations.
Svati Bhogle—A Master of Technology (M.Tech.) in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Powai, Svati too worked with the KSCTC. Here she was involved in technology generation, improvement in energy efficiency, and improvement in the quality of products for various rural process industries.
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