Fishermen casting their nets at night, a nomadic tribe in Kutch area of Gujarat, a small hut in a regular hamlet that lights the evening shadows with the help of a tiny wick lamp – these are just some of the beneficiaries of the new LED revolution. Led by InnovLite, a four-year old technology firm based in Bangalore, these lights and lighting solutions are hugely energy efficient, resulting in upto 60 per cent savings, recouping their higher initial costs within six months.

Started by BR Raghav, InnovLite is a profitable organization whose turnover is trebling every year, and it aims to achieve a target of Rs. 6 crore in the current financial year. Subir Roy of Business Standard writes more about this successful enterprise:

InnovLite’s products are all designed by it and put together from commercially available components, with only the LED element imported. Raghav, a 44 year old electrical and electronics engineer who earlier ran a data storage venture, has not cared to patent his products but bases his business model on being a moving target which is difficult for emulators to beat.

His forte is a combination of early start, rapid commercialisation and quick scaling. By the time a challenger arrives InnovLite has moved on, powered by the same kind of improvement in the efficiency of LED devices as is benchmarked by Moore’s law in the case of semiconductors.

Global lighting players find it difficult to come up with such do-it-yourself solutions because, he says, their development costs are high and they have legacy problems. Such products will also tend to cannibalise their existing products.

While LED lighting has already been adopted by large business establishments for its energy and cost savings, it is yet to reach the masses in a big way. But the future looks bright with companies like InnovLite, who have discovered the fortune at the bottom at the pyramid, and are benefiting millions of others, besides themselves, in the process.

Read the complete article here.
Image Courtesy: Ecofriend

14,000 employees. 40 locations across India. 23,375 hours of community service clocked. This has been the success story of Sankalp – the employee self actualization program at Hindustan Unilever Ltd. In order to mark 75 years of its existence in India, the company decided to devote 1 hour for each day of the 75 years in October 2007. One year later it has surpassed that goal.

HUL Sankalp is a program that allows the employee to register and get associated to a cause or NGO. The back-end support was provided by indianngos.com which was responsible for checking the authenticity of its partner NGOs and for tracking the employee’s commitment. Sapna Agarwal reports in Business Standard:

The programme has now gone beyond the cities to touch lives of people in the rural districts like that of Wad/ Jawahar. Here HUL Mumbai employees travelled 130 km to create awareness on hand wash and hygiene. Similarly, employees have also started involving their family members.

Nair added: “An employee, Crystelle Ellis along with her family clocked over 600 hours of voluntary service at the Little Sisters of the Poor, an old age home in Kolkata. Their activities included cooking, cleaning, serving, washing, helping the invalid to groom themselves and move about apart from helping with office work.”

Such initiatives reconfirm the belief that every person has an innate desire to do good and to give back to the society. They just need the right platform and the initial push. After this, in all probability, they will surprise themselves.

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Being disabled usually comes with its own set of economic limitations. However, this is now poised to change. Various products being made by different segments of physically challenged people shall now carry a brand name, and hence gain more market reach. This article in Business Standard reports:

The process began this week with the former President APJ Abdul Kalam launching the Association for Rehabilitation under National Trust Initiative in Marketing (ARUNIM), an autonomous body under the National Trust, for the welfare of persons with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities. The body will be run under the Ministry for social Justice and Empowerment. 

In essence, all those products such as cotton fabrics, perfumed candles and incense sticks etc, shall now be brought together under a single brand name. The ARUNIM will now become the official salesman and marketing arm for all these products tied together.
How does ARUNIM plan to go forward from this initial proposal:

ARUNIM, with a corpus of Rs 1 crore, is already on the move. Its chairperson Sminu Jindal, who also heads Jindal Saw and an NGO Swayam, says she will soon appoint a researcher or consultant to identify the available products with the 800 NGO members of the National Trust. These will now naturally become members of ARUNIM making it a huge cooperative network right from the beginning. 

Sminu goes on to say:

While the branding and marketing plans to help those with multiple disabilities and conditions like autism, ARUNIM may also be able to support people with temporarily disabled bodies, like from an accident or disease, says the wheelchair borne Jindal who lost her legs in a road accident. She gives full credit to the National Trust chairperson Poonam Natarajan for the effort.”It is Natarajan’s vision which has led to the birth of ARUNIM,” she says. 

Read the complete article here.

Image by Dhimant Parekh from here.