|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Mr. Santosh Choubey, CMD AISECT receiving the honor from Mr. Kapil Sibal, Honorable Minister for Human Resource Development and Mrs. Hilde Schwab, Founder of the Schwab Forum for Social Entrepreneurs
Santosh Choubey of AISECT among final four of the Schwab Social Entrepreneur of the year Award 2010
The Chairman and Managing Director of AISECT has been nominated as a finalist for the prestigious Social Entrepreneur of the Year (SEOY) Award 2010. The SEOY Awards, instituted by Jubilant Bhartia Foundation and the Schwab Foundation, identify and celebrate visionary social entrepreneurs who have demonstrated systems-change models and are at the stage of scaling/replicating their ideas across India and in other countries. Out of the 104 social entrepreneurs who had applied for the award, four have been announced as the final four on account of their sustained socially relevant work.
AISECT has been nominated for its pioneering work in the field of ICT based education and services in rural India that has opened up entrepreneurship and new employment opportunities for more than 1 million rural youth in their local ecosystems. About the organization’s endeavors, AISECT’s Director General Mr. Santosh Choubey said, “There has been a debate on how IT can be used in India for empowering people, providing services to them as well as for providing training and education. So, AISECT is basically a network which is working in Panchayats, Blocks and Districts in the country to provide IT education and IT based services to the masses.”
The organization has emerged over the past 25 years as a profitable semi-urban and rural education and services franchisee model with over 8000 centers in 27 states and 3 union territories. It was post 1976-77, when Mr. Choubey and his associates were promoting Science and Technology in Indian languages, that they realized the huge potential of IT as a tool of science and technology promotion. Fearing that this powerful technology would bypass most of the Indian masses, an initiative was taken by this group of people to do education and training based work in the area. Thus, AISECT was started in 1985 and since then the company has been engaged in the areas of skill development and training, development of models and teaching methodologies to strengthen the non-formal education sector, services dissemination across semi urban and rural India and execution of large e-Governance projects for the central and state governments, all of which are aimed at addressing the skill gaps pertinent to the emerging needs of a rapidly growing economy.
Sharing his experiences and the difficulties that he faced in the initial phase, Mr. Choubey said, “There are crores of people who do not know English and we had to develop software and training modules for training them in Hindi and regional languages. Then there was the issue of power and connectivity in rural areas. But now that the broadband and mobile services are reaching out to the Panchayat level, we can very easily mount ICT based services in our centers.” The AISECT centers are located at the Panchayat and Block levels and are multi-purpose in nature. Apart from training, services like data processing and data entry, exam form downloads and results viewing, selling of insurance policies and collection of premiums, ticket booking for railways and selling of recharge vouchers for telecom and DTH among others are also available.
The organization also interlinks with developmental programmes of the Government at the ground level where not many players are there. Over the years, AISECT has been involved in prestigious projects like Swarnjayanti Gram Swarozgar Yojana (SGSY), Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, Indira Suchana Shakti Yojana, Swashakti Project, Tejaswini Project and SRMS Project among others. Last year, AISECT bagged the Central Government sponsored Common Services Center (CSC) Project, emerging as one of the biggest service providers responsible for setting up almost 4500 centers across Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
On the subject of being nominated for the SEOY Awards, Mr. Choubey said, “There have been people in our country who have been social entrepreneurs but they were not termed as such. They would identify a social problem and try to solve it through entrepreneurial efforts without any Government support or aid. But now it has become a kind of conceptual framework in which people are working. This kind of recognition and this kind of projection of social entrepreneurship, which does not depend too much on the Government and which has got a compassion for the society, will push the entrepreneurship concept in a big way.”
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|