India Team

Ruchika Bahl, Director, Law for All Initiative, Asia
Ruchika joined the Ashoka team as Director, Law For All Initiative, India, Nepal and Sri Lanka in November 2003. Before that she worked with diverse target groups in her areas of interest and expertise - Gender and Social Policy, Microfinance and Human Rights with emphasis on women and child rights and on programs for the disabled. In her 10 years of work experience she was part of varied organizations ranging from international groups like GTZ, World Bank and Interights to National civil society groups like Majlis, Concern India Foundation and Muskaan. Ruchika is an alumnus of the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She also holds a degree in law from the University of Delhi, India. A British Chevening scholar, Ruchika loves to travel, meet new people, discover new cultures and indulge in adventure sports.

 Sohini Bhattacharya, Director, South Asia Partnerships
Sohini Bhattacharya is the Director of South Asia Partnerships for Ashoka in India. Sohini worked in the field of economic development and women for 10 years prior to joining Ashoka in 2000. She started out working with a premier Mother and Child Health organization in India and helped in the launch of a new program within the organization working on income generation and micro-credit for rural women. She spent 4 years in Delhi working with craftsgroups all over the country and understanding their challenges to create a development focus within a national organisation working with indeigenous artisans and also consulted women’s groups on gender training and micro-credit. Sohini then worked with an Ashoka Fellow to set up a Gender Rights Centre in Kolkata and coordinated the programs during the crucial first three years of launch. She joined Ashoka in March 2000 to help expand the Venture program in West India in which role, she brought together a diverse group of Fellows and strengthened the fellowship. Later on, she ramped up the the venture program nationally, built systems and created awareness and resources for Ashoka in India. Sohini holds a post-graduate degree in English Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta and loves traveling, 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 based in New Delhi.

Tanya Jairaj, Program Manager, Advocates for Social Entrepreneurs

Tanya Jairaj joined the Advocates for Social Entrepreneurship Program in Bangalore as a Programme Manager in 2006. Tanya is a lawyer by training and apart from litigating for a leading law firm for two years, she has worked with other NGOs in India on issues such as child rights, good governance and education, and also has experience in teaching. Prior to joining the team in India, she interned at the DC office. 

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 Mukherjee joined Ashoka’s 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.

Aditi Pany, Program Intrepreneur, Full Economic Citizenship

Aditi Pany joins Ashoka’s FEC team in India. After a childhood spent in the coastal Indian state of Orissa, Aditi headed to the arid desert of Rajasthan to get undergraduate degrees in engineering and economics from BITS Pilani. Here she broke new ground by becoming the first woman president of the students' union and helped found the Centre for Entrepreneurial Leadership. Aditi drove a rural entrepreneurship initiative which encouraged students to develop appropriate technology and income-generation projects for rural communities. Aditi interned for a year at the National Council of Applied Economic Research and then joined a CSO, TARAhaat – Development Alternatives. At TARAhaat, Aditi developed an ICT-enabled entrepreneurship training and support service and marketed it to prospective rural entrepreneurs in rural Uttar Pradesh. Aditi continues to mentor students involved with the entrepreneurship centre at BITS and has formed a Women's Council to enable networking among alumni.. For her community building endeavors, she was presented with the "30 under 30" award for all-round leadership by the BITS Pilani community given to achievers under the age of 30. Aditi's interests include handlooms and handicrafts, sea-swimming, painting and more recently photography. 

Lily Paul, Special Pojects Coordinator

Lily Paul has been managing Special Projects in Asia as part of Ashoka's 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 co-founder 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.

Dolon Sen, Program Manager, Ashoka's Youth Venture

Dolon Sen joined Ashoka in 1998 and is now a Program Coordinator with Ashoka’s Youth Venture in India. Prior to Ashoka, she taught in the primary section of a school meant for children from low income families. During her time with the Fellowship Program and the Youth Initiative, she has worked closely with the team to help nurture collaborations and connections between Fellows and looks forward to doing interesting work with young people. She has a Masters in History from University of Delhi and works out of Ashoka's New Delhi office.

Shivangini Tandon, Program Intrapreneur, Global Fellowship

Shivangini first came to Ashoka as an intern with the Global Development team in September 2006 and is joining the Fellowship team in India. Before joining Ashoka she received a B.A. from Boston University in Economics and Anthropology. Strongly interested in the issues of culture and identity, she turned to grassroots social change and conflict resolution to help her understand and resolve issues of issues of exclusion and marginalization in society. She attended a program on international conflict resolution and mediation in The Hague and did an urban study abroad with the International Honors Program, in New Zealand, China and India. While running around the globe, she helped redesign a youth empowerment project in New Zealand, keep the peace in her student group in India and thoroughly enjoyed the Chinese food and hospitality. Shivangini began her first social endeavor at age 8 in New Delhi, creating an “exclusive” social club that was open to all, to help dispel segregation in the playground. As a bit of an outcast in a somewhat racist low- income neighborhood in Glasgow, she continued the same, but with 5 year olds. She has had a nomadic life, having moved through fourteen schools, in rural and urban central India, Scotland, Delhi, Mumbai, the hills of Tamil Nadu, Boston and Washington DC. She is most content on a tree, but being a city girl now calls Mumbai her home.

Vipin Thekkakalathil, Program Intrapreneur, Ashoka's Youth VentureVipin 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.