Bengaluru: A group of IIT Alumni brought together many prominent NGO founders, and eminent members from the social change sector apart from the stalwarts from IIT brand for the launch of an ambitious initiative, IIT for Influencing India’s Transformation (IIT), which aims to bring a signicant social change in the not-for-profit sector in India.
“IIT for IIT is an organisation that is committed to be a catalyst for social change, particularly in the areas of education, livelihood & Skill development and Healthcare,” said Kartik Kulachand, Founder and CEO. “Our primary goal is to provide a platform to harness intellectual capital, enable engagement across the eco-system and create a vibrant and dynamic social impact community,” said Joseph Fernandes, Co-Founder.
Ramji Raghavan of Agastya, Ashok Sircar of Azim Premji University, Sudha of Nudge Foundation, Sam Venkatesan, Energy Plantation and formerly with Motorola, and Sangeetha Purushothaman of Best Practices Foundation also spoke about their experiences in the field and the need to work at scale for a long-term transformation of India.
The group aspires to achieve its goals by channeling the resources at the disposal of the IIT alumni network to create a successful sectoral movement. To achieve this, iit-iit.org will function as a facilitator, pooling the resources – funds, connections, business and technological know-how – of the IIT alumni, and marrying that to the pockets of excellence that exist within the sector.
The current leadership of IIT-IIT are already involved in social initiatives that have already been driving change across the country. For instance, Kartik Kilachand (who is spearheading iit-iit.org), is also the first promoter of www.head-held-high.org, an organisation which has been empowering youth in rural India by teaching them English and basic BPO skills. And, Ganesh Natarajan, former chair of Nasscom and another IIT-IIT.org member, is the force behind Pune City Connect, which, in collaboration with Pune Municipal Corporation, has been immensely successful in training young people to become technologically competent, and thus more employable. Other members include Harish Hande, Founder, Selco, India’s largest rural solar power entity which has lit up 650,000 rural village homes and Arjun Malhotra, co-founder of HCL, who sits on the board of some cutting-edge healthcare/education initiatives.
As per Mr Kartik Kilachand, serial entrepreneur and Chairman and Founder, IIT-IIT, “While there are thousands of NGOs in the country doing excellent work, the total scale for the sector is at best 30-40MM people that are being impacted. The entire size of the national need is at least 700-800MM Indians. To accelerate towards this goal is IIT-IIT’s mission.”
“Our primary objective is to provide a platform to harness intellectual capital, enable engagement across the eco-system and create a vibrant social impact community,” says Joseph Fernandes, Co-Founder IIT-IIT. “We’ve already met more than 50 successful social impact companies. All of them recognize the value that IIT-IIT will deliver – connect the dots across the sector to enable scale.”
Kartik adds: “The IIT-IIT organisation is enrolling 250 Founding Members from the IIT alumni community to form a core group and corpus to power IIT-IIT. We now need to hire a strong Mission Director, who will shape this exciting journey from 30MM to 300MM in an accelerated period. We are on the lookout for a firebrand IITian, who has been a successful entrepreneur, who will value this once in a lifetime opportunity to work with the best and brightest of IITians, Social Leaders. Foundations, Corporates and Government to shape the future of the social impact sector.”
