India Team

Ruchika Bahl, Director, Law for All Initiative, Asia
Ruchika joined Ashoka in 2003 to lead the Law for All initiative in South Asia. She designed Access to Justice Workshops with Ashoka Fellows and strategic partners to demonstrate the power of the law as a tool for social change. Ruchika's efforts have strengthened the rights of widows in Nepal, the mentally ill in India, and landless individuals in India. In the process, she has engaged the legal community, business entrepreneurs, academics, and journalists to address pressing issues such as corruption and the lack of governmental transparency and accountability Ruchika, a lawyer, is based in New Delhi, India, and is a member of the Delhi Bar Council. She holds a Master of Gender and Social Policy degree from the London School of Economics as well as a Master of Social Works from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Throughout her career she has addressed issues of women and law, disability and micro-enterprise development with diverse citizen sector and international organizations, including the World Bank and GTZ, India.

 

Siddharth Barthakur, Venture
Siddharth joined the Venture Program as the Ashoka Representative for the East and North-East in Delhi. Siddharth has a background in the corporate world and has set up an interesting cross-subsidy model guest-house for patients coming from the North-East to Delhi for medical treatment. Siddharth will look after Ashoka’s search and selection process for Fellows in the North-East.

 

Sohini Bhattacharya, Director, South Asia Partnerships
Sohini works in institution building for Ashoka. She worked in the field of economic development and women for 10 years prior to joining Ashoka in 2000. She worked in the start-up of an organization working on income generation and micro-credit for rural women while she was working in a premier mother and child health organization. She spent four years traveling all over India, working with indigenous craftsgroups, understanding and addressing their challenges on production and marketing and trying to provide development perspectives to a national level organisation. She has also consulted with women’s groups on micro-credit and other related issues and has been a founder trustee of a gender rights organization in Calcutta. She joined Ashoka in March 2000 first as the regional representative to help expand the Venture program in West India and later as the Director of Venture, India, o ramp up the Venture program, create awareness and resources for the organization. Sohini holds a post-graduate degree in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta and loves traveling, reading, theatre and photography. She also sits on the board of CREA, an organization working on enhancing women’s leadership and focusing on sexuality, reproductive health, violence against women and social justice. She is also on the Advisory Board for Read India, a newly launched initiative by Read Global to bring entrepreneurship and education to rural India. She is based in New Delhi.

 

Robin Bose, Global Engagement Team
Once a Venture intern with Ashoka's global office, Robin returns as a Senior Intrapreneur in Delhi. Between his stints at Ashoka, he has worked in the US, UK, and India with corporate and civic sector organizations in finance, publishing, and public health. Robin also co-founded Global Partnerships for Activism and Cross-cultural Training (Global PACT), a network of young leaders solving self-identified problems in their communities. He helped develop Global PACT's core methods in Mongolia, facilitated its programs in the US, and helped lead its month-long all-Balkans workshops in 2005 and 2006. He holds a bachelor's degree in Economics and International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania

 

Tanya Jairaj, Fellowship
Tanya coordinates the Fellowship program in India. Tanya is a lawyer by training and has litigated with a leading Indian law firm for two years. Before joining Ashoka, she worked with several NGOs in India on issues such as child rights, good governance and education. She has also worked previously at the United Nations (Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs), New York, and, the National Human Rights Commission, New Delhi. Tanya has also worked as a primary school teacher for some time. Prior to joining the Ashoka team in India, she interned at the DC office. She is based in Mumbai.

 

Shivani Manaktala, Senior Advisor, Full Economic Citizenship Initiative
Shivani Manaktala manages the Full Economic Citizenship Initiative at Ashoka, India, that looks at business – social joint ventures for reaching products and services to low income clients in a commercially sustainable manner. She has a mix of private sector and social sector experience. Her private sector experience has included setting up a cheese manufacturing unit with a team of entrepreneurs. Her citizen sector experience includes work with a consulting firm, as chief of programs with an International NGO working in enterprise development and agriculture value chains. She has written several papers and been a speaker at international conferences on enterprise development. Shivani is a graduate in Economics and holds an MBA.

 

 

Devashri Mukherjee, Director, Venture

Devashri joined Ashoka in 2001 and is a veteran of our Venture program, having found and brought in social entrepreneurs from remote areas in India such as Ladakh and Meghalaya. Among other initiatives, she led the first systematic mapping of the Indian citizen sector so as to uncover new fields and entrepreneurs in the sector. Devashri brings to Ashoka over ten years' work experience in the Indian citizen sector, having been involved in exciting initiatives at an education resource center, a leading Indian funding agency, and one of the first education portals of India. Her interest lies in creating children's education material, and her children's stories have been published as resource materials. Devashri holds a Master's Degree in Comparative Literature, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and is based in Mumbai, India. In her spare time, she enjoys art museums and classical music.

 

Dolon Sen, Venture
Dolon works with Ashoka's Venture program which helps select individuals into the Ashoka Fellowship. Prior to Venture, she had been associated with Ashoka's Fellowships and Youth programs and worked closely with the teams to help nurture collaborations and connections between Fellows. Prior to Ashoka, she taught in the primary section of a school meant for children from low income families. She has a Masters in History from University of Delhi and works out of Ashoka's New Delhi office.

 

 

Vipin Thekkakalathil, Youth Venture

 Vipin came to know about Ashoka through David Bornstein's 2004 book on social entrepreneurship, "How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas”. He joined Ashoka’s Youth Venture and is currently building the program in Mumbai. During his college days Vipin worked on a variety of projects dealing with palliative care and children with challenges. He also co-founded an organization, which served as a platform for peaceful inter-religious dialogue between students from different faiths during the communal rights in 2002. As part of his Masters of Social Work program, Vipin focused his thesis on child sexual abuse and through the process he began to see the larger society's indifference and denial of the issue and the total lack of support systems for abused children. Vipin helped set up Tulir - Center for the Prevention & Healing of Child Sexual Abuse in Chennai, an organization which works on the prevention of child sexual abuse (CSA). In 2005, Vipin and his team were selected for the Change Looms Awards, a national award given to young social entrepreneurs, which recognized their work on the prevention of CSA through “Personal Safety Education” in the schools of Chennai.

 

Vishnu Swaminathan, Director, Housing for All

Vishnu joins Ashoka with more than 14 years of experience as entrepreneur and innovator. He started two IT based companies in Singapore in the areas of financial transactions and animation technology. Following acquisition of one of the companies, he moved to India to head a leadership school based in Pune, where he led the school's social effort by creating a independent Centre for Social Development. He worked on large government projects with an aim to donate the surplus for funding citizen sector organizations. Most recently he ran an assignment with National Innovation Foundation, a government sponsored organization working on grassroots Innovation at national level in India. He started his career as a 3D and Film Special effects artist, later turning towards project management. He holds couple of patents from his ventures. He has worked on a wide range of technologies, projects, training and strategic business models and been a leader at those initiatives. He holds a MBA from University of Southern Queensland.

 

Lily Paul, Director, Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur

Lily Paul has been has been building and managing Ashoka Support Network in India as part of Ashoka's Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur team. She led a unique social marketing initiative promoting social entrepreneurship through David Bornstein's book 'How to Change the World'. Lily has also been building Ashoka's citizen base in India and helping social entrepreneurs collaborate with business and academia. Lily is a counsellor who works with families and has cofounder of ‘Chrysalis’, a training and counseling group that helps people through workshops on a variety of skills. Her previous experience includes a 5 year stint with a nationalized Bank and 7 years as a Sub-broker in a Stockbroker’s office. Lily has also been involved in promoting art and has worked in Public Relations.