NEW DELHI: At Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, every student mandatorily takes up a social project as part of the core curriculum. The objective is to make the students understand the society at large and sensitise them to the challenges faced by various sections of the society.
However, there has recently been a shift in the focus of such projects at India’s top business schools. These programmes now increasingly seek to link business goals with social objectives.
From the broad themes such as ‘women’, ‘physically challenged’, ‘education’ and ‘healthcare’, IIMK now has a wide array of projects covering the entire gamut of public issues at the grassroot levels.
IIMK is actively involved with the Unnat Bharat Abhiyan, Swachh Bharat Abhiyan, Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana and projects at gram panchayat and local self-government levels. The business school helps increase the delivery efficiency and effectiveness of these programmes, and ensures that these projects reach the beneficiaries.
“There is increased expectation from the government in terms of involvement of the premier institutes in various development initiatives and projects of the government.
There is also an increased realisation and emphasis on inculcating an appreciation and building an attitude towards linking business goals with social objectives,” said IIMK director Kulbhushan Balooni. Other business schools, too, have community engagement at the top of their agenda.
ET had last month reported how in the last one year more than 20 teams of students from IIM Ahmedabad studied sanitation and toilet behaviour among people in at least 15 talukas in Gujarat, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s hometown Vadnagar.
These teams recently submitted a set of suggestions to the state government to reach its Swachh Bharat target. Engagement with community is on top of the agenda for business schools like IIM Ahmedabad. More and more B schools are now working on improving public systems and services at village panchayats and municipalities.
Says Ronnie Screwvala, entrepreneur and philanthropist: “I find the younger generation of today automatically leaning towards creating an impact in what they pursue.
It’s also important to not segregate social and impact businesses from normal businesses as I am a firm believer that in India, all impact has to be at ‘scale’ and for us to be able to deliver at scale — it needs to not be looked like a subsidised approach — but should be for profit but with impact.” IIM Calcutta is doing just that.
The institute that had launched a national-level contest on social entrepreneurship in collaboration with theTata Group called the Tata Social Enterprise Challenge (TSEC) in 2012-23, has now launched two more initiatives under the banner ‘Thinking Social’ in the past year.
One is a seminar series and the other a roundtable series. The objective of the seminars is to promote awareness about social entrepreneurship among youth. Such seminars are held in leading academic institutions across the country. The roundtables are held in metros targeting corporate CSR, NGOs and regulators.
“We are committed to supporting ‘for-profit’ social enterprises which can solve some challenging social problems. Our students provide voluntary services to NGOs and woman entrepreneurs under an initiative called INCA (Initiative for Community Action),” said Ashok Banerjee, director of IIM Calcutta Innovation Park.
IIMC plans to incubate 10 social enterprises per year for the next four years, and would provide seed fund and mentorship support.
“We would also ensure that at least 30% of these scale up and raise second round of funding. We plan to do during 2016-17 at least 10 awareness programmes across the country on social entrepreneurship. We focus on the following areas — healthcare, education, livelihood, clean energy,” Banerjee added.
For its part, IIM Bangalore adopted five gram panchayats in Navalgund in Karnataka, in February 2016. Professor Gopal Naik and his team from IIMB are working on interventions that can be made in the gram panchayats at Gudisagar, Tadal, Alagawadi, Shishuvinahalli and Halakusugal.
IIMB plans to begin with agriculture, education, rural digital services as well as information access and training in the first year of the village adoption project. Small entrepreneurs in these gram panchayats will get help from IIMB to tackle challenges in their respective business.
“The social sector is a very vibrant space for managers. My course on Inclusive Business Models has met with enthusiastic response from students and is usually oversubscribed,” said Sourav Mukherji, dean of Academic Programmes at IIMB.
IIMB has also launched an initiative to provide its massive open online courses (MOOCs) in 73 government degree colleges. “We will primarily cover colleges in the backward districts of the state such as those in the Hyderabad-Karnataka region,” said Gopal Naik, chairperson of Economics & Social Sciences area, IIMB.
Since last year, IIMB started a project to impart education in English communication in these colleges on the lines of its tele-education programme — Satellite and Advanced Multimedia Education (SAME) — in some government schools. The programme has on its rolls 20,000 students. The aim is to impart MOOCs parallel with the English education programme, said Naik.
