SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

By Dr. (Mrs.) Indu Shahani

Summary

Indu Shahani’s twentieth Bhogilal Leherchand Memorial Lecture, delivered on 15 December 2008 and published by the Forum of Free Enterprise in April 2009, makes the case that social entrepreneurship — the disciplined application of entrepreneurial tools to large-scale social problems — is the most promising response to the limits of charity, philanthropy and state provision. Shahani opens with the story that drew her into the subject: shortly after becoming the 110th Sheriff of Mumbai she was approached by two returnees from England who proposed the “Dial 1298 for Ambulance” service, a cross-subsidy ambulance network modelled on the London Ambulance Service that has grown from two to fifty-one vehicles in three years.

She defines a social entrepreneur as one who, unlike a business entrepreneur, measures success in terms of impact on society, and sketches an operational framework: a public good delivered to those who cannot otherwise access it; both the founder and the organisation acting as catalysts of change; and the founder eventually morphing into a figurehead for a wider movement. The lecture roams across historical exemplars (Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, Maria Montessori, Margaret Sanger, John Muir, Jean Monnet, Vinoba Bhave) and contemporary cases (Verghese Kurien’s Amul, Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank, Dr. V.’s Aravind Eye Care, Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College, Ela Bhatt’s SEWA, Vikram Akula’s SKS Microfinance, HUL’s Project Shakti, and Dhruv Lakra’s Mirakle Couriers).

Shahani frames the moment as one in which corporations, NGOs and citizen groups are converging on hybrid for-profit / non-profit models that combine, in Peter Drucker’s phrase, business discipline with social mission. She quotes C. K. Prahalad’s bottom-of-the-pyramid thesis and Hilde Schwab’s Schwab Foundation work, argues that business schools must absorb social entrepreneurship into their curricula (citing Gregory Dees), and closes by urging India’s youth to lead the way — capitalism, she contends, is the efficient creator of wealth, socialism the more equitable distributor, and a marriage of the two is desirable provided it is built on integrity and transparency. The booklet also carries an editor’s note by S. S. Bhandare and a tribute biography of the lecture’s namesake, the Bombay diamond and textile industrialist Bhogilal Leherchand (1894–), who is described as a staunch nationalist close to Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Key points

• Distinguishes a social entrepreneur (measures success by societal impact) from a business entrepreneur (measures profits, growth, diversification), while insisting both operate within an entrepreneurial framework of innovation and self-sustainability.

• Uses the Mumbai “Dial 1298 for Ambulance” service — a cross-subsidy model where private hospital calls subsidise government and below-poverty-line calls — as the personal case study that drew Shahani into the field as Sheriff of Mumbai.

• Surveys historical and global exemplars (Anthony, Nightingale, Montessori, Sanger, Muir, Monnet, Vinoba Bhave) and Indian cases (Amul, SEWA, Aravind Eye Care, Barefoot College, SKS Microfinance, HUL Project Shakti, Mirakle Couriers).

• Endorses C. K. Prahalad’s bottom-of-the-pyramid thesis and Peter Drucker’s claim that “it profits us to profit the non-profits”, arguing hybrid for-profit / non-profit models are the future.

• Calls on business schools and corporates to embed social entrepreneurship in MBA curricula (citing Gregory Dees) and praises corporate schemes such as the Tata International Social Entrepreneurship Scheme and the Nand & Jeet Khemka Foundation’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year Awards.

• Concludes that capitalism efficiently creates wealth and socialism more equitably distributes it, and that a synthesis of the two — disciplined by integrity, capability and transparency — is the right paradigm for social ventures.

• Appended biography of Bhogilal Leherchand (b.16 April 1894), the Bombay diamond and textile-mill industrialist whose motto was “simple living and high thinking”, a nationalist close to Mahatma Gandhi and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

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