ShanSa, a Mumbai-based social enterprise that brings about eco-friendly and commercially viable solutions for toxic bio-medical waste disposal won the 2016 First Social Enterprise ‘Idea’ Challenge. The award is instituted by the Azim Premji University. The company works towards transforming this unorganized field into an organized sector.
The unique award, meant for university and college students across India, is to encourage and provide the students a platform to exhibit their ‘innovative ideas for social change’. The contest witnessed more than 100 teams broadly in the domains of education, livelihood, health, sustainability and governance. Following rigorous rounds of evaluation, Shashanka Sekhar from K.J.S.I.M.S.R, Mumbai bagged the first prize for his unique idea on “ShanSa”. Receiving the award he said his next step is to implement and scale the idea.
Anurag Behar, CEO, Azim Premji Foundation & Vice Chancellor, Azim Premji University said: “Ideas are the beginning of change, but I believe they are not enough; most importantly you need action, execution and people for social change”.
Anil Kumar Reddy and Sandeep Sharma from N.I.T. Nagpur won the second prize for their idea on “Donatekart”. It has been conceived as a crowd-sourcing platform for social organizations where they can run campaigns listing down the products that they are in need of, and donors can donate these products online. This will be an e-commerce platform where instead of delivering products to people deliver to NGOs.
According to the team, “this is going to be a first of its kind platform which primarily focuses on product donation, thus building the trust and transparency in donations made to charities. Donatekart delivers the products to the organization and donor gets frequent updates on the product utilization. As no money is getting involved and new products being delivered by Donatekart makes this platform unique”.
Divyang Panchal, Vrundavan Bhatt, Sudeep Patel from IRMA, Anand and the joint idea of Nitish from Montfort College, Bangalore and Sherlie Priyanka Stephen from Christ University, Bangalore shared the third prize for the competition. IRMA’s idea named ‘Hastkala’ is on producing and marketing hand-made invitation and greeting cards with the help of the poor. Montfort College and Christ University’s idea is around public health, named as RISE. The basic idea is to create a platform that consists of database of counsellors across Bangalore and making their service accessible to the general public. The winning teams were provided certificates and cash prizes worth Rs.50,000.
The jury consisted of Rajiv Kuchhal, an active angel investor and mentor to multiple startups in social enterprise and technology space. Aruna Rao, a social innovation professional, coach, educator and network builder. She is the Bangalore, India-based program director at Acara, an impact entrepreneurship program at the University of Minnesota. Ram is the co-founder and CEO of Rang De, a game-changing effort to lower the cost of credit.
