The eSafal team led by Annie Mathew, a student of the ISB Class of 2006 has made it to the Global Final of GSVC 2006. Charan Chintakindi, an alumnus of the ISB Class of 2005, is also a member of the eSafal team. The Final will be held at the Columbia Business School in New York City on April 7, 2006. The finalists were chosen after a reading of their plans by an evaluation team from the Haas School of Business, the Columbia Business School and the London Business School.


Annie and Team Presenting Plan at the Asia Round

eSafal, will transform agriculture and thereby villages in India, by creating a virtual community of agricultural industry players, through efficient knowledge and information linkages using information technology. This will lead to new opportunities for economic activity and wealth creation through increased farmer’s income. The team has successfully completed a pilot project and is looking forward to quickly scaling up operations.

Our best wishes to the team.

The Indian School of Business (ISB) hosted the Asia Semi Final of the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC). The event was held at the ISB on January 28 and was the culmination of a six-month effort at promoting and organizing the competition.

The Preliminary Process
To promote the competition, the ISB sent out information about the competition to over 300 business and technology institutions across Asia. It also created a micro site for GSVC to provide necessary information to participants. These efforts resulted in 66 teams representing 27 business schools, from 6 different Asian countries, registering for the competition. 40 of these teams submitted full business plans as their entries to the Asia Round of the competition. The plan submitted sought to exploit opportunities in a variety of areas such as agriculture, education, environment, health care and micro finance. The 40 plans went through a process of preliminary evaluation at the ISB by judging teams consisting of people with experience in the social sector and ISB students. The judging teams short listed 16 of these plans for a presentation round at the ISB on January 28.

Click here for a snapshot of plans received at the preliminary stage.

Presentation Round @ ISB
The presentation round of the GSVC Asia Semi Final was formally inaugurated by the Dean of ISB Professor M Rammohan Rao on January 27, 2006. To mark the occasion ISB also organized a Handicrafts Mela wherein local NGOs show cased products of ventures they were supporting.

An eminent panel of judges evaluated the 16 business plans short listed for the presentation round. The panel comprised Ms Sara Olsen (SVT Consulting), Ms Kim Alter (Virtue Ventures), Ms Alice Lin (IFC, Washington), Mr R S Sharat (DFID -UK), Ms Lakshmi Venkatesan (BYST), Mr Sarath Naru (APIDC Venture Capital and Venture East), Prof V Chandrasekar (ISB), and Prof K Ramachandran (ISB).

Following the presentations, the judges short listed 10 teams from Asia to participate in the Global Semi Final of the competition. Click here to view the teams short listed for Global Semi Final.

These ten teams then attended a mentoring workshop held on January 29, 2006 by Ms Sara Olsen, Ms Kim Alter, Mr Subramonia Sarma (Director - Entrepreneurship Development ISB), and Ms Payal Aggarwal (ISB alumnus and Global Finalist GSVC 2004) wherein they were provided inputs on improving their plans, with a special focus on social impact tracking and measurement, and their presentations.