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Daan Utsav: Unlocking Social Innovation For Bharat

We need to be impatient for change with our patient capital, write Pramod Bhasin and Aparna Dua.

A man scans his thumb in an e-PoS machine, at a village in Tikamgarh district, Madhya Pradesh, on Aug. 7, 2020. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)
A man scans his thumb in an e-PoS machine, at a village in Tikamgarh district, Madhya Pradesh, on Aug. 7, 2020. (Photographer: Dhiraj Singh/Bloomberg)

This #DaanUtsav, BloombergQuint brings you a series of first-person accounts of how different organisations across India are making interventions at scale, or in depth, and bringing about significant transformation.

One of the most fascinating parts of signing up for the LivingMyPromise pledge is to think critically about how we create the most impact not just with wealth but also the entire network, knowledge base, and skills we have developed over the years. Designing this strategy is as important as the application of wealth itself, and then applying these levers to effectively solve for some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

Asha Impact, set up as an impact investment and advocacy platform, leverages the expertise, networks, and capital of Indian business leaders, family offices, and philanthropists to support the scale-up of inclusive business models and shares these insights with the government to amplify and effect impact at a much larger scale. Our philosophy is strongly rooted in the belief that major development challenges can best be addressed through radical tri-sector collaboration between markets, government, and civil society.

Through the investment arm, Asha Impact supports enterprises that are deploying cutting-edge solutions to age-old social problems, innovating on product, service delivery, and processes to find affordable, yet aspirational solutions to serve the masses. They’re successfully delivering on the dual objectives of financial return as well as social and environmental impact.

For example, we have supported Nepra, an enterprise who through the use of technology is helping cities manage their waste better and converting waste to wealth. It has also effectively integrated waste pickers in its value chain, offering them decent incomes and a shot at a dignified life.

Another company, Gramophone, provides timely, customised advisory on agri-inputs, weather, market price and crop choice, and access to quality inputs to small and marginalised farmers at their doorstep, which has the potential to reduce overall costs, increase yield and net-income.

Our non-profit Asha Trust shares actionable recommendations on policy and implementation bottlenecks with the government based on learnings from the ground, to enable increased capital flow and a supportive regulatory environment for social enterprises.

We have looked at process improvement for online building permits for affordable housing developers, scaling best practices of waste management in cities, designing on-ground implementation programs for effective behavior change needed for segregation of waste at source. We’ve worked alongside other stakeholders to provide thought leadership on the proposed amendments to the CSR law and the impending Social Stock Exchange.

We have also been on the forefront to galvanise the market for blended finance structures such as impact bonds that support high-impact non-profits to scale their impact and drive focus on achieving improved social outcomes. The work of the Trust coupled with the investment platform is helping develop the ecosystem for impact enterprises in India and thus reaching millions in a sustainable way.

The application of technology to solve difficult, complex problems has always been close to my heart. And healthcare, not just in India but across the world, is ripe for this.

We just cannot wait around to produce enough doctors, nurses, and hospital beds to solve our healthcare needs.

But if we use technology smartly, not just within hospitals and clinics, but also in cities and villages, we can leapfrog our status quo to achieve much better coverage and health outcomes. 90% of healthcare issues don’t need a hospital anyway.

Technology today can make a substantial difference in many different areas of healthcare, but here are four of them.

  1. Significantly increasing awareness and prevention on all basic hygiene protocols – washing hands, sanitation, cleanliness practices. Imagine spreading this through every mobile phone in the country.
  2. Building software and training healthcare workers to deliver services remotely—to the hardest to reach villages and people—and connecting with doctors via smartphones for remote diagnostics.
  3. Delivering medicines via drones, again to the hardest to reach areas and small villages, ensuring timely access to life-saving drugs.
  4. Using predictive analytics and tracing to catch and forecast the spread of diseases, so that efforts can be focused on specific areas as much in advance as possible.

These can be huge game-changers for India, and all of them are now within reach. We need to run pilots, build templates, make them successful and then scale – and we can do it fast. We need to be impatient for change with our patient capital!

Pramod Bhasin is the founder of Asha Impact, Genpact, Clix Capital, and chair of the board of governors at ICRIER. Aparna Dua is Senior Manager at Asha Trust.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of BloombergQuint or its editorial team.