Meet 5 women entrepreneurs who started up for social good and to bring change
Many women entrepreneurs in India are heeding the call for innovation in areas such as agriculture, environment, and women empowerment. Here are five inspiring stories of social entrepreneurs keen to change status quo.
In a deeply divided capitalist world, many billionaires are now encouraging innovation for social good.
While they may not be able to bridge the divide between the haves and have-nots immediately, innovations by corporates go a long way in supporting the underprivileged.
Notably, many women in India are heeding the need for innovation in areas of agriculture, environment, and women empowerment, among others, thereby contributing to the larger social good.
HerStory presents five women entrepreneurs and the various startups and platforms they have built to bring change.
Sujata Chatterjee
Sujata Chatterjee felt overwhelmed at the waste generated by fast fashion trends and the toll it takes on climate change. Hence, she left her corporate job as salesperson at Hewlett-Packard India, and started her social venture Twirl.Store in 2017.
The platform, nearly three years old, encourages people to send in clothes they no longer need and gather points that can be redeemed on its ecommerce platform. It segregates clothes based on whether they can be upcycled into bags, jackets, accessories.
Clothes that cannot be upcycled are distributed in slum areas in Santiniketan and Sunderbans in West Bengal. The Kolkata-based entrepreneur works with an all-women team – eight core members and 40 on the outskirts of the city.
Abhilasha Purwar
Social entrepreneur Abhilasha Purwar founded
in July 2018 to tackle the impact of climate change. The artificial intelligence (AI)-based startup provides real-time environmental data and offers actionable environmental insights into air and water qualities.Abhilasha, who started Blue Sky with her brother Kshitij, wants to make their app BreeZo the Bloomberg for environment-related data.
Abhilasha holds a master’s degree in environmental management from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She was determined to do something when she saw the impact of climate change up close, when a river turned orange in Chandrapur, Maharashtra.
She had then just completed her master’s in applied chemistry from IIT, Varanasi, and was working on IoT-enabled air pollution monitoring devices at Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Today, the 29-year-old has worked with around 11 organisations and also mentors budding social entrepreneurs.
Inner Goddess
Anannya Parekh’s startup Inner Goddess empowers women by making them understand the importance of financial literacy. It aims to address financial anxiety, mental health issues, and personal investing, and has organised more than 70 workshops so far.
The startup caters to young women between the ages of 16 and 25 years, who hail from underprivileged backgrounds.
The workshops earlier charged between Rs 300 and Rs 20,000, but Inner Goodness now functions as a non-profit organisation.
Exemplifying the popular adage, ‘Today a reader, tomorrow a leader’, her social venture has impacted over 10,000 women across Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru, since starting up in September 2016.
Ruchi Jain
Ruchi Jain quit a government job to connect with farmers on ground who play an important role in the economy. After acting on four different ideas and exhausting all her savings, Ruchi invested Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 in a group of farmers who were unable to sell their jaggery produce and eventually founded
.A farmer-focused startup, Taru Naturals focuses on natural and organic farm produce. Jaggery powder is one of its bestselling products, with clients like Taj Palace hotel in Mumbai and Blue Tokai. Other products such as black rice, khapli wheat flour, and sourdough flour are also popular.
With her mother Poonam Jain, a naturopathy expert, as founding partner, the startup’s main objective is to be a platform to serve the farmers of India.
Shailza Dasgupta
Shailza Dasgupta co-founded
in April 2017, starting with five homestays in Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh.Apart from making the homestays service more organised with her Co-founder Vinod Verma (also a travel photographer), she promotes low impact eco-tourism and aims to educate and help people travel responsibly.
The startup has now expanded to a network of more than 100 homestays across 21 states. Shailza helps in getting families offering homestay services onboard, and trains them in different aspects of hospitality, guest handling, basic conversational English, health and hygiene, homestay management, and ways to adopt eco-friendly practices.
(Edited by Rekha Balakrishnan)