Fellows by Category
Rural Innovations Network
Paul Basil identifies promising rural innovations, develops them into enterprises, and enables their diffusion through commercial and noncommercial ventures. Through his work, Paul is extending social investment to rural areas and ensuring that the best solutions reach as many thousands of people as possible.
Santosh Choubey sees the IT and mobile revolution connecting all of India in the next ten years and wants to ensure that rural youth will be equipped to take the opportunities that come with it. An avid author of books and poetry, he is committed to bridging the skill and IT gap between urban and rural India and creating local opportunities for rural youth.
Through interventions based on modern technology in Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, and Orissa, India, Rikin Gandhi is focusing on the efficiency of information dissemination and application and creating new knowledge networks for agriculture extension services. Rikin’s method entails replacing the old architecture of agriculture extension services with a new one; and the community is...
Rajeev George offers a viable solution to the acute housing problems faced by the urban poor. His unique approach to city planning is founded on high-integrity, verifiable data, the strategic use of future-sensitive technology, and the active participation of settlement dwellers.
Center for Science for Villages
Dr. Vibha Gupta is bringing the benefits of science and technology to India's rural women in an effort to raise economic productivity, increase health and quality of life, and reduce the drudgery of everyday labor.
Harish Hande is uplifting underserved populations by selling, servicing, and financing clean energy that improves their quality of life. The ingenuity of Harish’s approach came from questioning three assumptions, namely, that the poor cannot afford clean and sustainable energy; they cannot maintain such systems; and, an organization cannot operate a commercial venture while trying to meet...
Rajendra Joshi’s organization, Saath, creates public, private and citizen sector partnerships to transform the slums of large Indian cities into equitable living environments for vulnerable communities.
Ashok Khosla’s Development Alternatives Group innovates sophisticated technology, creates delivery mechanisms for widespread scale and equips local entrepreneurs in India to manage small enterprises. Ashok has pioneered a commercially viable model to integrate social development, economic development and environmental preservation in the citizen sector. Development Alternatives today is one of...
Ashru Kumar Mandal, for 19 years a village school teacher in West Bengal, India, has developed a number of ways villagers can build Bio-Gas plants that hold up over fire and then maintain and operate them successfully.
Indian English and Hindi dailies devote only 2 percent of their total coverage to rural issues, as they do not have the mechanism to be able to source stories from rural and marginalized areas. By building a pan-India network of professionally trained citizen video-correspondents, drawn from the poorest and marginalized communities, Jessica is creating the architecture necessary to ensure...
Muthu, an environmental toxicologist, still close to his roots as a Harijan (untouchable) boy, growing up poor in rural Tamil Nadu, wants to protect those who always get the dirtiest jobs, the poorest and most vulnerable, from the chemical risks that increasingly characterize such jobs -- be they leather tanning or applying pesticides.
Pan Himalayan Grassroots Development Foundation
Kalyan Paul is providing local communities in the central and western Himalayas with the organizational, technical, and managerial skills to effect ecological restoration of their area.
