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• In India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, where little over 40% of women are literate, Pooja Mishra of IIM Calcutta, has started a secondary school and degree college to provide low cost quality education. Pooja’s Gurukul Mahavidhyalaya, founded in 2008 at Purasi village near Rai Bareilly, has 218 students – a majority of them girls - pursuing undergraduate courses • Reading the morning paper can be made into a lucrative business, proved IBS Mumbai student Manisha Parpiani with her startup ‘InfoSieve’. InfoSieve provides domain specific mobile content to students, derived from daily newspapers and blogs, in areas such as finance, HR and marketing. Launched during placement season, InfoSieve prepared students for interviews with quick news updates • Annapurani Venkatesan became an entrepreneur at 19 with a tutorial centre. Jayanthi Coaching Centre trains students on subjects like Accountancy and Commerce. Of her 23 students, 11 have achieved top grades in their exams. Annapurani is herself a student, pursuing a degree in Commerce at Alpha Arts and Science College, Chennai |
Pooja, Manisha and Annapurani were among the ten outstanding women E Leaders (Entrepreneurship Leaders) selected as Cherie Blair Foundation for Women-National Entrepreneurship Network (CBFW-NEN) Fellows for the year 2010-2011. The Fellowship program, now in its second year, recognizes young women who have used entrepreneurship as a tool to solve problems and affect change in their communities, their academic institutes and their own lives.
The Fellows were selected from over 500 NEN member institutes across India, for demonstrating entrepreneurial leadership on their campuses and beyond, by launching campus companies, running startup camps, creating student entrepreneur helplines and establishing networks.
As CBFW-NEN Fellows, the young women leaders were felicitated by Cherie Blair, Founder, Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, at the CBFW Women Mean Business Conference held at Mumbai on December 8, 2010.
The young E Leaders also had hour-long one-on-one interactions with Cherie Blair, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Chairman and Managing Director, Biocon; Shailesh Rao, Managing Director, Google India and Dr Sunita Maheshwari, Founder, Teleradiology Solutions.
Elaborating on the relevance of the CBFW-NEN Fellowship Program, Cherie Blair said, “The CBFW-NEN Fellows demonstrate the potential of young women and the important role they can play in the societies in which they live. The CBFW-NEN Fellowships are designed to nurture and strengthen the capacity of these young women to take the next step to successful entrepreneurship, provide practical solutions to problems, grow their businesses and in the process improve the societies in which they live.”
For these 10 young entrepreneurs-in-making, the exposure has been a huge learning experience. “Multi-tasking and being enterprising is what the conference and my interactions with some of India’s celebrated leaders taught me,” says Niveda Krishnamoorthy, a CBFW-NEN Fellow from Coimbatore’s PSG Tech, who plans to start an IT-focused research-based venture in future.
Laura Parkin, Chief Executive Officer of the National Entrepreneurship Network(NEN), which came together with the Cherie Blair Foundation to create and manage the awards, believes that the CBFW-NEN Fellowship Program is designed to inspire, equip and enable India’s young women to become entrepreneurs and leaders – a need that has become significant today, considering the yawning gap between men and women in leadership positions. “Only after we started the CBFW-NEN Fellowship Program, did we become acutely conscious that even today, most top leadership positions in the institute E Cells are held by young men. We see that pattern continue across those heading startups. The CBFW-NEN Fellowships, and programs like this, are critical to recognizing the achievements of young women, and thereby create role models to inspire many other young women to achieve similarly.”
| CBFW-NEN Fellows 2010-11 | |
| Akshina Gupta, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi - has helped launch eight startups, four of them student-run. Akshina laid the foundation of the Student Entrepreneurship Network at IIT Delhi, and along with it, offered a complete startup toolkit, with an entrepreneurial resource pool, knowledge-sharing workshops and idea exchange portals. |  |
| Ankita Gupta, Indus World School of Business, Greater Noida – A class-topper, who had played a key role in her institute E Cell. She is also the editor of her institute’s newsletter. For her summer project, Ankita contributed to setting up a business unit in a village in Uttarakhand to manufacture and distribute low-cost sanitary napkins. |  |
| Annapurani Venkatesan, Alpha Arts and Science College, Chennai - converted her passion for teaching into a profitable business and also integrated E Cells in Chennai. |  |
| Apurva Jain, Student, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur - designed and led Cleantech Challenge, a unique B Plan competition targeting the clean technology sector. The event witnessed entries not only from colleges across India, but also from USA, China and Denmark. |  |
| Manisha Parpiani, IBS Mumbai – runs a student startup ‘InfoSieve’ that provides domain specific mobile content to students. Launched four months ago, InfoSieve won 100-plus customers in the first month itself, with a profit margin of 60% per customer. |  |
| Neha Chahar, Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development, Pune - utilized her academic course content on Competency Mapping to develop an assessment centre for potential student entrepreneurs. She launched a consultancy program which connected students to live startup projects, thereby helping students acquire domain specific skills, while gaining exposure to setting up and running a business. |  |
| Niveda Krishnamoorthy, PSG College of Technology and Polytechnic, Coimbatore - built an excellent track record of implementing high-impact entrepreneurship programs. She also helped launch PSG Tech’s campus company, ThirstE, a juice shop. |  |
| Pooja Mishra, Indian Institute of Management, Kolkata – started secondary school and degree college to provide low cost quality education. Pooja’s Gurukul Mahavidhyalaya, founded in 2008 near Rai Bareilly, has 218 students – majority of them girls |  |
| Sona R, Rajalakshmi Engineering College, Chennai – increased E Cell membership at her institute from 12 to 2,300 with a committed campaign. Sona has worked with Hardum.com, an early-stage web startup, and played a key role in its launch in 2009, supporting its online marketing initiatives |  |
| Urvashi Agarwal, Management Development Institute, Gurgaon - has been responsible for organizing the largest startup showcase event in the history of IIT Kanpur while working there. While usually showcase opportunities at IIT Kanpur were limited to hosting stalls, Urvashi energized it with a VC Pitch, one-on-one mentoring, and networking sessions. The showcase closed with 12 startups (against five the previous year), six venture capitalists and 150 budding entrepreneurs participating. |  |
“The knowledge-sharing sessions, speaker interactions and peer-to-peer networking opportunities we had as Fellows have been highly motivating. I am now more resolved to become a successful entrepreneur, tapping the vast opportunities that exist in India today,” says Sona R, a biomedical student at Chennai’s Rajalakshmi Engineering College.
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More articles on www.nenonline.org. Content provided by NEN
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written by Bottega , March 07, 2011
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