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SKS at the Crossroads
By Shloka Nath On a rainy afternoon at a five-star hotel in suburban Mumbai, Vikram Akula is making a fervent pitch to a group of potential investors in the enterprise he founded, SKS Microfinance (SKS). Akula and SKS chief executive Suresh Gurumani take turns at the mike to impress on the rainmakers the advantages of investing in SKS, well on its way to becoming the world’s biggest microlender. While their purpose is the same, the two men present a study in contrast. Akula,...
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IDE India Featured on PBS
NewsHour correspondent Fred de Sam Lazaro reports on how India is trying to feed its growing population while maintaining the environment. Watch the full video: ...
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We Must See India As One – Prahalad
When Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad and his colleague Stuart Hart wrote an article on the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) in 1998, no management journal accepted it. Unconvincing, they said. In 2002, Strategy+Business agreed to publish it and that one idea changed the way multinationals thought. Suddenly, everyone was looking at poor people across the world as a lucrative market. Prahalad followed his idea up with the bestselling title The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. The fift...
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A Paradigm Shift in Ayurveda
Imagine this: You are a budding and ambitious entrepreneur in your mid 30s and you are interested in healthcare or say Ayurveda, to be more precise. The best part is you are also sanctioned an appreciable fund to set-up a chain of Ayurveda centres across India. Sitting in your boardroom, you are thinking about the locations for your new centres. Which places are you likely to choose, keeping in mind that you have sufficient funds? Maybe a place where there are high-income gro...
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Danone May Apply Bangladesh Lessons to India
Groupe Danone, the $18-billion French dairy company, is understood to be exploring a strategy for India which will leverage on its experience in Bangladesh. One of the things Danone is studying is to enter with an affordable initiative, what it internally calls a bottom of the pyramid one. Danone has a joint venture with The Grameen Group in that country, from early 2006, with a focus on easily affordable dairy products. The Grameen Danone Foods model relies on the creat...
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A Fresh Start – Rural Job Seekers Find a Brighter Future
To get a sense of India’s rural-urban union, drop in on a McDonald’s restaurant in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, where hungry customers scan the brightly lit menu panel above the counter and line up to place orders. The eatery, nestled in a busy shopping mall in downtown Hyderabad, is unique: Most of the youngsters flipping burgers and taking orders are not city slickers, but employees recruited from India’s rural belly. Take college dropout K. Bhargavi, 23, who...
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Economic Crisis Forces Businesses to Focus on the Poor
In India, the economic crisis may actually be good news. During the salad days of the past decade, India’s entrepreneurs grew fat selling gas guzzlers and palatial homes to the country’s new rich, while ignoring the needs of the biggest segment of Indian consumers: the poor. It was an expatriate Indian, the University of Michigan’s C.K. Prahalad, who first posited that there were millions to be made selling to the "bottom of the pyramid." Now that’s start...
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Indian Regulations Stifling for Social Investing
Harold Rosen founded the Grassroots Business Initiative (GBI) of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation in 2004. In 2008, GBI spun off into the non-profit Grassroots Business Fund, which, among other things, looks at funding socially relevant projects in India. Rosen spoke to Atul Sethi about the potential of social enterprise funding in India: What makes you want to invest in India? India’s world-class, cost-effective skilled labour force canno...
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