Big Idea - Green Livelihoods

It's been a hectic fortnight. Looking for a flat/ house in Gurgaon. Sometimes you can be spoilt for choice:-)

At the airport, leafing through the latest Outlook Money with the cover story on 30 businesses under Rs. 5 lacs, stumbled upon this innovative 'green company' Bamboo House India!

Bamboo House India, a social enterprise, started by two First Generation Entrepreneurs, Aruna Kappagantula & Prashant Lingam in 2008 aims to use Bamboo as an economic driver for providing sustainable livelihood opportunities to rural & tribal artisans in the Bamboo sector through market linkages.

BHI is striving to create a chain of bamboo showrooms across the country which shall promote & market all bamboo based products under one roof starting from Bamboo pens to Bamboo Housing Structures!
Do check out their products here!

Their vision is to create a long term sustainable non-migratory business model for rural and tribal artisans in the Bamboo sector by using locally available raw material i.e. bamboo and develop contemporary life style products to suit the market tastes and demand rather than being consigned to age old basketry items.

I am trying to get in touch with Aruna and Prashant. Starting this month, I plan to devote 10-15% of my time to support, help market and evangelise such efforts. In case you know of any social-enterprise that is in need of marketing, strategy, branding, design support, please direct them to me. I would be happy to help them!

Wish BHI best of luck in their innovative and sincere effort to create green livelihoods!

Power of Sub-titles

I had to write about this.

Girirajsingh Natubha studied up to Class 2 in Jamnagar. All his life he struggled to read simple words. A few years ago, however, he found to his surprise that he had begun to read.

It happened quite amazingly after he began watching Chitrageet, a Gujarati television programme of film songs, which had subtitles at the bottom of the screen.

Since he knew many of the songs, he could anticipate the next word. When it appeared he would read it unconsciously and sing along, karaoke style. Soon he found he was able to recognise words in the bazaar and before long he was reading headlines in the newspaper.

A brainchild of Dr Brij Kothari, a social entrepreneur and an IIM Ahmedabad professor(now at Cornell), 'Same Language Subtitling' is a simple but powerful idea which is proven to improve literacy among adults and children.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Dr. Kothari won the $250,000 global innovation prize from the World Bank, which he has used to pay for the cost of subtitling.

For the past five years, every Sunday morning, 15 crore persons have watched Chitrahaar and Rangoli with subtitles. A Nielsen-ORG study, conducted in 2002 and 2007 to assess the impact of subtitling, showed that only 25% school children could read a simple paragraph in Hindi after five years of schooling.

However, this jumped to 56% if they were also exposed to subtitling for 30 minutes a week on Rangoli. Equally dramatic results were found among adults.

Is there a way to micro-fund Dr. Kothari and his efforts. And not just in money. Imagine, all the Internet connected people, the active user base of 20mn volunteered to sub-title the TV content for a literacy movement in India!
Far better than mere burning candles to support causes!

Could Infosys, Wipro, or some company volunteer their computing capacity to help in this endeavour. What better way if some of us can help all of us!

Dr. Kothari gets the Grand Prix for his big idea!! How do we help such social entrepreneurs guys?