Case Studies

We feel honoured, we are a young enterprise and being recognized by an institution like World Bank is a great feeling. We are pretty enthused to move ahead in a comparatively faster manner...we are looking forward to the coming 24 months when we are going to get various kind of inputs.

Basically a start-up needs to use the grant for the costs of capacity building of community, mobilization etc. Then there is the technical, research and development cost for doing the innovation part. The third necessity is providing the market linkage to the producer groups. These are the 3 core things that social entrepreneurs [look for] and for these, funds are not available. This will be the greatest benefit of the DM.

Through DM we have proposed to scale it up to different areas covering another 44,000 households where we can monitor the social security scheme. I am definitely thrilled and excited because this money will [make] us think in a different way, to upgrade our technology, our HR and streamlining our processes from a certain level to a different level. We need to build our capacity through DM.

In the last 3 years we have trained and placed 10,000 people [in jobs]. In this World Bank sponsored project we are trying to train and place 10,000 people in Bihar alone.

DM is the beginning...it definitely feels good. It has taken a lot of thought process as to how we take reliable lighting sources to Bihar...Winning DM matters a lot...the financial support will help us to build infrastructure, develop capacity of people to implement the program [of providing quality lighting to the poor] properly in Bihar.

As far as scale is concerned, we have understood that a lot of capacity building is required for that. Resourcing and networking [with] other agencies is also important.

We are looking at this money more as in investment in infrastructure development as well as human resource development. We believe that the results of this will be seen very soon.