The Unstoppable Indians?

India Resource Center

I am very passionate about Entrepreneurship and teaching the course too. It was a strange experience in my life that I realised theory and practice are different after I had a very close shave with a colleague-friend-turned first generation Entrepreneur in Hyderabad. Every businessman can not be an Entrepreneur and vice versa. This is my finding. There are Social Entrepreneurs who do not look at making money as first priority. They have other mottos of helping and working for others through enterprise and innovation.

I was teaching initially a course titled "Entrepreneurial Finance" at TAPMI for a few years in a Program - PGDEM. Later, between 2006 and 2009, while teaching at Alliance Business School in Bangalore, I taught for three years a course on Entrepreneurship & New Venture Creation. During the course, more than dealing with fundas of entrepreneurism, I used to make my students to study (not read) the profiles of several successful entrepreneurs in India and abroad. They used to present in the Class Room and I used to relate to the concepts. In the process, I came across a few more terminology like Edu-preneurs, Tech-preneurs, NRI Entrepreneurs and Social Entrepreneurs.

Speaking about Edu-preneurs, we have simple and straight examples like Dr TMA Pai of Manipal, Matha Amrithananda Mayi of Amity and Sathya Sai Baba of Sai University in Puttaparthi. At least the first one was a Medical Doctor but went on to start a cooperative society, a bank which was later nationalised (Syndicate Bank), a Degree College (MGM) followed by Medical, Dental, Pharmacy, Allied Sciences, Engineering, Architecture, Communication, etc. This is now Manipal University - India's first private university catering to students from not only all India but over fifty countries beginning with Malaysia, Srilanka, USA, UK, Gulf and so on.

Amrithanandamayi is a fisher-woman, studied up to third standard and belongs to Kerala. She is a Saint and works for world population. She set up a University with Medical, Engineering and Management faculties in TN-Kerala border near Coimbatore. Similarly, Sathya Sai Baba is not even a Tenth Pass but the range of social activities he undertakes including Education is unbelievable.

And in the website of http://www.ibef.org/ I took a page uploaded by NDTV Profit narrating powerful stories of ten individuals who are rendering yeomen services. There are titled as THE UNSTOPPABLE INDIANS. Worth viewing and reading too. That is Social Entrepreneurship.