OPINIONS

Armed with plastic buckets and mud pots, a heavily pregnant lady, ‘Aarti Meshram’ along with her nine-year-old daughter and six-year-old son trudge nearly two kilometres in the searing Vidarbha heat to join an endless queue of humanity for the ‘elixir of life’ – water being supplied through tankers. While Aarti required complete bed rest considering...

Social innovation is going through a dynamic phase in India and ‘Design Thinking’ – a new and potent approach to problem solving is creating a buzz amongst innovators. Design thinking is centred on innovating through the eyes of the end user. It encourages in-the-field research that builds empathy for people, which results in deeper...

Technology enabling the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals will potentially be one of the most powerful drivers of change in modern economies going forward.

Have you ever wondered what it takes to make green home? Is it to plant a lot of greenery around your house or use renewables to power your home or have your home run on hi tech machines?

In my first piece in this three-part series, I introduced systems thinking and discussed why it is so relevant for the development sector and CSR. In this second piece, I will talk about some prominent approaches, methodologies and tools for the on-ground application of systems thinking. Systems thinking has inspired several approaches and methodologies over...

The term paradigm shift is an interesting one. If you considered a dictionary meaning then it will reveal a paradigm shift as a shift in direction of any business or strategy of a nation from the past for the betterment of future, or something along those lines. If we keep the year 2000 as a starting point, what is that moment when you felt Indian sport made that shift?

We know that an education model is deemed effective when students are provided with ample opportunities to access interactive content, information in multiple formats and visually appealing literature. Enhancing education outcomes requires mammoth efforts, one of which includes helping students to better monitor their learning through use of potent learning techniques. A part of...

Creating opportunities for a million people, through skill training – this key initiative of Godrej Good & Green’s vision 2020 for enhancing livelihoods is a classic model of skilling the nation through a combined and collaborative effort. Even as we have skilled over 268,000 individuals across 23 states in partnership with more than 30...

Businesses over time have realised that the conventional reporting is too complex, lacks relevance and wasn’t enabling the sufficient communication between businesses, stakeholders and investors. Traditional reporting has evolved to be more for regulators than for business itself.

Whilst India has experienced significant economic growth over the last 20 years, much of this wealth generation has been inequitable. On one hand, we have a 'Shining India' with 101 billionaires, and a rich and middle class of 160 million.  On the other, there is an India still struggling to earn a decent living, majority...

To make interventions in the development sector work, we need more than attitude, legislation and participation. We need effective strategies, efficient execution and robust measurements.

Digitisation and automation have altered the way organisations function at every step. Cloud storage, data analytics and digital technologies have made sharing of ideas, data and information fairly commonplace. Business Intelligence is no longer a term associated only with the corporate sector. The development sector is gradually realising the potential of data and its ability...