Shri Anurag Singh Thakur
Union Minister for Information and Broadcasting and Minister for Youth Affairs and Sports, Government of India
Date: Thursday, 15th September 2022

The Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award - India was established by Jubilant Bhartia Foundation and Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship as an endeavour to promote social entrepreneurship in India. For over a decade the award has been recognising & awarding entrepreneurs who implement innovating, sustainable and scalable solutions to social issues for underserved communities of India.

Osama Manzar
Digital Empower Foundation
www.defindia.org

Year Established: 2002

Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) is a non-profit organisation working towards empowering citizens through digital literacy and digital tools to gain access to better healthcare, education, skills and livelihood opportunities. DEF focuses on making technology easily accessible to the masses so as to empower them by providing functional digital literacy, media literacy and digital up-skilling across.

• Impacted over 30 million people, through 1,500-strong Community Information Resource Centers, across 24 states, supported by 10,000 digital foot soldiers

Ajaita Shah
Frontier Markets
www.frontiermkts.com

Year Established: 2011

Through its unique rural distribution platform, is driving access to the products and services that the rural population wants to be delivered at their doorstep. These products and services are high quality, climate friendly, gender-inclusive and also include clean energy-services. It is doing so by investing in rural women, making them entrepreneurs and building a strong network, which acts as a bridge to rural communities.

• Enabled over 20,000 women rural entrepreneurs to help over 500,000 families in over 3,000 villages adopt over 10 million solutions

Aniket Doegar
Haqdarshak
www.haqdarshak.com

Year Established: 2016

Haqdarshak is solving the information and access gap between citizens and the government’s welfare schemes at the last mile, through its tech-enabled intervention. It digitises information on government schemes in a simple form in 11 vernacular languages and makes it available to intended beneficiaries including SMEs through various B2C channels and an agent-led model. It also has an easy eligibility-discovery engine.

• Trained over 22,800 agents across 24 states, providing benefits worth Rs 4,000 crore to over 20 lakh families and 35,000 micro businesses

Wilma Rodrigues
Saahas Zero Waste
www.saahaszerowaste.com

Year Established: 2013 & 2001

Saahas Zero Waste (SZW) is a socio-environmental enterprise providing decentralised end-to-end waste management services. It strives to ensure that more than 95% of waste is converted to resources, thus addressing issues of open dumping, burning, landfilling and contamination of air, water & soil. It branched out of Saahas NGO in 2013. With over 20 years of cumulative experience both entities work towards holistic solid waste management.

• Worked with over 100 clients including multinational brands across 22 states and 2 union territories, managing an average of 100 tonnes of waste per day

Meera Shenoy
Youth4Jobs
www.youth4jobs.org

Year Established: 2012

Youth4Jobs Foundation (Y4J) works for the grass-root transformation of lives of persons with disability by skilling and linking them to sustainable livelihoods. Youth have locomotor, speech, hearing and visual impairment. Some have cerebral palsy, autism spectrum, downs syndrome, and multiple disabilities. Y4J works with 1,100 companies to ensure the hired youth is productive and it benefits business.

• Trained over 31,000 youth with disabilities with job linkages, reaching 9.3 million households in 28 states, 8 Union Territories