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Ten new insights in climate science 2023
- Mercedes Bustamante, Joyashree Roy, Daniel Ospina, Ploy Achakulwisut, Anubha Aggarwal, Ana Bastos, Wendy Broadgate, Josep G. Canadell, Edward R. Carr, Deliang Chen, Helen A. Cleugh, Kristie L. Ebi, Clea Edwards, Carol Farbotko, Marcos Fernández-Martínez, Thomas L. Frölicher, Sabine Fuss, Oliver Geden, Nicolas Gruber, Luke J. Harrington, Judith Hauck, Zeke Hausfather, Sophie Hebden, Aniek Hebinck, Saleemul Huq, Matthias Huss, M. Laurice P. Jamero, Sirkku Juhola, Nilushi Kumarasinghe, Shuaib Lwasa, Bishawjit Mallick, Maria Martin, Steven McGreevy, Paula Mirazo, Aditi Mukherji, Greg Muttitt, Gregory F. Nemet, David Obura, Chukwumerije Okereke, Tom Oliver, Ben Orlove, Nadia S. Ouedraogo, Prabir K. Patra, Mark Pelling, Laura M. Pereira, Åsa Persson, Julia Pongratz, Anjal Prakash, Anja Rammig, Colin Raymond, Aaron Redman, Cristobal Reveco, Johan Rockström, Regina Rodrigues, David R. Rounce, E. Lisa F. Schipper, Peter Schlosser, Odirilwe Selomane, Gregor Semieniuk, Yunne-Jai Shin, Tasneem A. Siddiqui, Vartika Singh, Giles B. Sioen, Youba Sokona, Detlef Stammer, Norman J. Steinert, Sunhee Suk, Rowan Sutton, Lisa Thalheimer, Vikki Thompson, Gregory Trencher, Kees van der Geest, Saskia E. Werners, Thea Wübbelmann, Nico Wunderling, Jiabo Yin, Kirsten Zickfeld, Jakob Zscheischler
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- Global Sustainability / Volume 7 / 2024
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- 01 December 2023, e19
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Non-technical summary
We identify a set of essential recent advances in climate change research with high policy relevance, across natural and social sciences: (1) looming inevitability and implications of overshooting the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) urgent need for a rapid and managed fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges for scaling carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding the future contribution of natural carbon sinks, (5) intertwinedness of the crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) compound events, (7) mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility in the face of climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems.
Technical summaryThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment Reports provides the scientific foundation for international climate negotiations and constitutes an unmatched resource for researchers. However, the assessment cycles take multiple years. As a contribution to cross- and interdisciplinary understanding of climate change across diverse research communities, we have streamlined an annual process to identify and synthesize significant research advances. We collected input from experts on various fields using an online questionnaire and prioritized a set of 10 key research insights with high policy relevance. This year, we focus on: (1) the looming overshoot of the 1.5°C warming limit, (2) the urgency of fossil fuel phase-out, (3) challenges to scale-up carbon dioxide removal, (4) uncertainties regarding future natural carbon sinks, (5) the need for joint governance of biodiversity loss and climate change, (6) advances in understanding compound events, (7) accelerated mountain glacier loss, (8) human immobility amidst climate risks, (9) adaptation justice, and (10) just transitions in food systems. We present a succinct account of these insights, reflect on their policy implications, and offer an integrated set of policy-relevant messages. This science synthesis and science communication effort is also the basis for a policy report contributing to elevate climate science every year in time for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
Social media summaryWe highlight recent and policy-relevant advances in climate change research – with input from more than 200 experts.
Ten new insights in climate science 2022
- Maria A. Martin, Emmanuel A. Boakye, Emily Boyd, Wendy Broadgate, Mercedes Bustamante, Josep G. Canadell, Edward R. Carr, Eric K. Chu, Helen Cleugh, Szilvia Csevár, Marwa Daoudy, Ariane de Bremond, Meghnath Dhimal, Kristie L. Ebi, Clea Edwards, Sabine Fuss, Martin P. Girardin, Bruce Glavovic, Sophie Hebden, Marina Hirota, Huang-Hsiung Hsu, Saleemul Huq, Karin Ingold, Ola M. Johannessen, Yasuko Kameyama, Nilushi Kumarasinghe, Gaby S. Langendijk, Tabea Lissner, Shuaib Lwasa, Catherine Machalaba, Aaron Maltais, Manu V. Mathai, Cheikh Mbow, Karen E. McNamara, Aditi Mukherji, Virginia Murray, Jaroslav Mysiak, Chukwumerije Okereke, Daniel Ospina, Friederike Otto, Anjal Prakash, Juan M. Pulhin, Emmanuel Raju, Aaron Redman, Kanta K. Rigaud, Johan Rockström, Joyashree Roy, E. Lisa F. Schipper, Peter Schlosser, Karsten A. Schulz, Kim Schumacher, Luana Schwarz, Murray Scown, Barbora Šedová, Tasneem A. Siddiqui, Chandni Singh, Giles B. Sioen, Detlef Stammer, Norman J. Steinert, Sunhee Suk, Rowan Sutton, Lisa Thalheimer, Maarten van Aalst, Kees van der Geest, Zhirong Jerry Zhao
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- Journal:
- Global Sustainability / Volume 5 / 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 November 2022, e20
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Non-technical summary
We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate decisions and ways to overcome structural barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.
Technical summaryWe synthesize 10 topics within climate research where there have been significant advances or emerging scientific consensus since January 2021. The selection of these insights was based on input from an international open call with broad disciplinary scope. Findings concern: (1) new aspects of soft and hard limits to adaptation; (2) the emergence of regional vulnerability hotspots from climate impacts and human vulnerability; (3) new threats on the climate–health horizon – some involving plants and animals; (4) climate (im)mobility and the need for anticipatory action; (5) security and climate; (6) sustainable land management as a prerequisite to land-based solutions; (7) sustainable finance practices in the private sector and the need for political guidance; (8) the urgent planetary imperative for addressing losses and damages; (9) inclusive societal choices for climate-resilient development and (10) how to overcome barriers to accelerate mitigation and limit global warming to below 2°C.
Social media summaryScience has evidence on barriers to mitigation and how to overcome them to avoid limits to adaptation across multiple fields.
Acknowledgements
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Index
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Contents
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Preface
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
Harish Hande, the founder of SELCO, was my senior at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. Our paths crossed a decade later when I learnt that Harish, having completed his PhD, was building an organization that would provide solar lights to poor villagers in his home state of Karnataka. I travelled with him in upcountry Karnataka and saw first-hand how the lack of access to energy created challenges in the lives of villagers and how the work that Harish was planning to do was a lifesaver for them. Having grown up in a town and later staying in a city, I had little familiarity with the life in villages. I had never seen as much darkness in my life as I witnessed in those villages at night. Harish was lighting up their lives. I came back awestruck and inspired. But I did not fully comprehend what Harish meant when he said he would create a business where he would sell solar lights to the villagers. Looking at their economic conditions, I could not imagine how the villagers were going to pay Harish. Should he not raise funds from charitable institutions and just donate these lights, I wondered.
After I joined Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Bangalore as a faculty member, I focused on researching about Indian multinationals competing in international markets. While I continued to follow Harish's and SELCO's journey with admiration, it was quite distant from what I was teaching and researching as an academician. Around 2007, at an international conference in Bratislava, I met Sahba Sobhani from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) who explained to me the concept of inclusive markets and gave the example of SELCO. Sahba was looking for academics who could write case studies on organizations that created inclusive business models. Suddenly, I remembered what Harish had tried to explain to me almost a decade ago – how it was possible to address the needs of the poor by building a financially sustainable business – and things started to make sense.
I told Sahba that I would write a case on SELCO and I started my research in this domain.
9 - International Development Enterprise (Ide) Nepal: Developing Smallholder Ecosystem
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
In this chapter, we talk about the evolution of International Development Enterprise (IDE), a not-for-profit organization working in rural Nepal, and the impact that its various development initiatives have had in improving the socio-economic conditions of smallholder farmers. IDE raises funds from donor and philanthropic agencies and utilizes them to develop smallholder communities by creating livelihood opportunities.
IDE in Nepal evolved from being a supplier of technology for irrigation and water storage to becoming a critical enabler of a smallholder ecosystem that was sustainable and scalable. While the context of this case is rural Nepal, the socio-economic conditions of smallholder farmers are not very different from that of India and many other emerging nations where the lessons learnt from this case can be replicated. The advantages of developing and empowering economically underprivileged communities are well known. This case demonstrates the process of creating such communities and making them self-sustainable. It also highlights the critical role that various stakeholders, such as the government and development organizations, can play in enabling such communities to overcome their vulnerabilities.
IDE Nepal is one of the few cases in this book dealing with a not-for-profit organization. IDE by itself is not an example of an inclusive business model unlike most other cases described here. However, it enables the creation of inclusive businesses that is essential for developing and sustaining the smallholder ecosystem. IDE's case also helps us to understand the different ways in which a not-for-profit can create value for economically underprivileged communities when compared to inclusive business models. This is a theme that we will visit in greater detail in the concluding chapter of the book.
EVOLUTION OF IDE NEPAL
International Development Enterprise (IDE) is an organization that operates in 11 countries worldwide with the aim of creating income opportunities for poor, rural households in developing countries. Established in 1981 by a group of North American social entrepreneurs, IDE provides the rural poor in Asian and African countries with low-cost access to water for agricultural use and links them to markets so that their agricultural products can be sold profitably.
Frontmatter
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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List of Tables
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10 - Ruralshores: Delivering Inclusive Service
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
While close to 62 per cent of India's 1.3 billion population lives in villages, agriculture contributes to only about 15 per cent of India's gross development product (GDP) (Plecher 2020). Even though a significant part of the rural workforce is involved in non-agricultural activities, such as services and trading, rural India is unable to generate adequate employment opportunities for its workforce, resulting in high rates of unemployment as well as disguised unemployment. Any such adverse statistics are more unfavourable for the female population than the male. For example, while the employment-to-population ratio for rural male was 51.7 per cent in 2018, it was a mere 14.2 per cent for women. This results in large-scale migration of the youth from villages to cities in search of jobs. Given the conservative nature of India's villages, it is very unlikely that parents of young women would allow their daughters to go to cities on their own in search of jobs. Therefore, while educated men from Indian villages often have the option to migrate, educated women can only search for employment opportunities within their villages until they get married. Their inability to find suitable livelihood opportunities not only acts as a dampener for parents to educate their girl child but also perpetuates the idea that the only responsibility of the parents of girl child is to get her prepared for marriage, which, therefore, should be conducted as early as possible.
With a total revenue of USD 28 billion, India has a thriving business process outsourcing (BPO)3 industry that employs about 1.1 million people (Talgeri and Singh 2018). Almost all such BPO organizations are located in big cities, such as Bengaluru, Gurugram or Pune. Apart from the ready availability of English-speaking educated youth, these cities provide the suitable physical infrastructure that is essential for running such a business.
RuralShores is a BPO organization that wanted to change this urban-centric model and set up operations in rural India. It intended to create employment opportunities for the rural youth close to their villages to prevent their migration to cities. It was established in 2008 and three years later, it operated 10 centres across seven India states and provided employment to over 1,000 rural youth. The following sections describe how it established its business, the impact that it created and the challenges that it confronted on its way.
4 - Rang De: Creating a Platform for Social Investing
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
Microfinance, or specifically microcredit, comprises lending small quantities of money to the poor to address their entrepreneurial or personal financing needs. In developing countries like India, the poor do not usually have access to formal sources of credit, which prevents them from undertaking any entrepreneurial activity that has the potential of increasing or diversifying their income. Microfinance can be considered as the poster child of inclusive business models, thanks to the pioneering effort of Muhammad Yunus, who, in 1983, established Grameen Bank in Bangladesh that showed the world that it was possible to build a profitable bank whose sole purpose was to provide micro-loans to the poor.
THE GRAMEEN BANK MODEL
Yunus, a professor of economics at the Chittagong University in Bangladesh, realized that small loans could have a significant positive impact on the lives of the poor during his visit to the nearby village of Jobra. There, he met poor women who were involved in making bamboo furniture. However, since they did not have access to formal credit, they needed to take loans from moneylenders to buy bamboo, the raw material. The moneylenders charged them such exorbitant rates of interest that the women could hardly make any profits and continued to remain poor. Yunus lent USD 27 to 42 such women, which resulted in them earning profits from their businesses for the first time. This led Yunus to investigate the systemic problems that resulted in the poor's inability to get formal credit and what could be done to overcome those problems.
There are several problems that prevent a poor person from getting credit from formal financial institutions, such as a bank. The poor usually do not have assets that they can pledge to the banks as collateral, nor do they have any credit history for the lender to rely on. Therefore, they are viewed as high-risk borrowers. Moreover, the loans that they need are typically of small denominations, which implies that the income that the bank can earn from the interest on such loans was meagre, compared to the transaction costs that the lender would incur in evaluating the borrower or for processing the loan. This compels the poor to borrow from informal sources, such as friends and family members, and, very often, from moneylenders.
3 - Gyan Shala: Providing Inclusive Education
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
There are 1.5 million schools in India catering to 250 million students. Eighty-five per cent of these schools are located in rural India and 75 per cent of them are run by the government. However, the share of students going to private schools has been steadily increasing and the 25 per cent of schools that are run privately cater to little less than 50 per cent of students (Majumdar 2018; Nambissan 2012). While in developed countries, private schools typically cater to students from rich households, Indian private schools cater to students coming from a wide economic background, such as children of migrant labourers to those of company CEOs and rich businessmen. Low-cost private schools are a set of schools that cater to children from low-income households. They are often run by individuals from their homes, charging fees that are lower than those of government schools and sometimes even lower than the minimum daily wage, as earned by the parents of these children. It is unofficially estimated that about 92 million children are enrolled in about half a million low-cost private schools in India.
The need for such low-cost private schools that can educate children from poor households is likely to grow in India, given (a) the large-scale migration that continues to happen from villages to cities; (b) failure of the government to expand its schools in urban areas to keep up with the pace of urbanization; and (c) poor public perception of the quality in government schools. Migrant labourers typically settle in slums in the cities, places that are characterized by poor infrastructure, high population density and lack of basic amenities. Eijipura in Bengaluru, purportedly the largest slum in the city dubbed as the Silicon Valley of India, is an example. It has 10,000 school-age children living within an area of 7.5 square kilometres. If one has to follow government regulations regarding minimum space that is required to set up a school, only two schools can be established in this area, which can cater to a maximum 2,000 children. Therefore, the need for the 8,000 remaining children can only be fulfilled by low-cost private schools.
5 - Labournet: Empowering Informal Sector Labourers
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Close to 90 per cent of India's working population belongs to the unorganized sector, people who are typically poor, consumption deprived and socially vulnerable. During the last two decades, even while the number of people below the official poverty line has reduced, the number of people consuming less than INR 30 per day has increased within the informal sector. A majority of people working in the informal sector are rural migrants who come to the city in search of livelihood because of dwindling opportunities in the villages. India's sprawling cities are able to absorb many of them because of the booming construction sector as well as an increasing tendency among Indian corporations to outsource their non-core activities. However, in the cities, the migrant labourers face hostile conditions and the wages they receive are grossly inadequate to make ends meet. Thus, if India wants to solve its poverty and inequality problem, it needs to squarely address the needs of informal sector workers. LabourNet, a for-profit social enterprise, is trying to address these needs. M. Gayathri, the Managing Director of LabourNet, noted,
Even though cities attract them in large numbers, cities do not assimilate the poor migrant labourer. Arriving from the villages, they do not have any place to stay, do not get the kind of food that they were used to. Without an identity, they are unable to prove their BPL status. Thus, they may be living in the cities for fifteen years, yet they do not belong to the cities, being always at the receiving end of its hostilities and exploitation. One needs to think about catering to some of their fundamental needs that would enable them to survive the harsh realities of cities. This is what LabourNet intends to do.
ORIGIN AND EARLY DAYS
The roots of LabourNet lay in MAYA (Movement for Alternatives and Youth Awareness), a Bengaluru-based NGO founded in 1989 with the intention of dealing with the problem of child labour. MAYA wanted to send children working in the streets back to school and its founders along with volunteers spent the next several years spreading awareness among children, youth and communities about the evils of child labour and enrolled working and street children into non-formal education schools.
2 - Vaatsalya Hospitals: Affordable Healthcare in Proximity
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
This case describes the evolution of Vaatsalya Hospitals – a network of hospitals, set up in small towns and cities in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. In India, good quality healthcare services are mostly provided by private hospitals that are located in large cities and focus on tertiary care. Nearly 800 million Indians living in semi-urban and rural India have little or no access to high quality healthcare services at affordable prices. Vaatsalya was founded by two doctors, Dr Ashwin Naik and Dr Veerendra Hiremath, in 2004 to fill this gap. They decided to provide good quality primary and secondary healthcare to semi-urban and rural India by setting up a network of low-frills and low-price hospitals. In their four-and-a-half years of operation, Vaatsalya established nine hospitals across seven districts in Karnataka, created a capacity of more than 450 beds and treated close to 175,000 patients, making it the largest chain of its kind. The case describes the various challenges that Vaatsalya faced and the different ways in which it overcame them in the process of establishing a financially sustainable business model.
STATE OF HEALTHCARE IN INDIA
The inadequacies of the Indian healthcare system cause 1 million Indians to die every year and leave 700 million without any access to specialized care. While more than three quarters of the Indian population lives in villages and small towns, 80 per cent of specialist doctors are located in urban areas. As a result, patients from semi-urban and rural India are forced to choose, more often than not, between the local unqualified practitioner and the free treatment provided at the nearest government-run hospitals that are characterized by poor quality equipment, unhygienic conditions and perennial absence of appointed doctors and hospital staff. A survey of government-run healthcare centres revealed that there was a high rate of absenteeism among doctors (43 per cent), nurses (40 per cent) and pharmacists (30 per cent) (Muralidharan, Chaudhury and Hammer 2011). Likewise, researchers found the infrastructure in Indian healthcare facilities to be more deficient than that of many countries in sub-Saharan Africa, which are poorer than India (Bajpai 2014).
As and when patients realize that neither of these two options – the local quack or the government hospital – is going to provide them with the necessary cure, they undertake long journeys to reach hospitals in big cities.
6 - Selco: Inclusive Model for Energy Access
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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According to the Indian census in 2011, 81 million households in India suffered from energy poverty, of which 71 million were in rural India. Energy poverty is defined as households having less than adequate consumption of energy, using a polluting source of energy or spending excessive time in collecting fuel. While the Government of India took an aggressive target of connecting every Indian village to the grid and declared in April 2018 that, with the electrification of Leisang village in the state of Manipur, India has achieved 100 per cent rural electrification, connection to the grid did not imply that households in a village had access to electricity. A village was declared electrified if 10 per cent of the households could access electricity along with public institutions, such as health centres and schools. Hamlets and the residences of poor households were not considered in this calculation. Thus, even if a greater number of households might have obtained access to electricity post the 2011 census, a significant part of rural India and considerable part of urban India continue to have unreliable and intermittent access to electricity, if at all. Dr Harish Hande founded SELCO in 1995 to sell solar lights to the poor with a belief that access to solar energy would significantly improve the productivity of rural households. By 2010, SELCO had sold solar lights to more than 120,000 rural homes and 4,000 institutions, such as orphanages, clinics, seminaries and schools, in the state of Karnataka. Additionally, through its partnership with the Self-Employed Women's Association (SEWA), it had provided energy-efficient cook-stoves and solar lamps to another 80,000 poor consumers in the state of Gujarat. In this chapter, we look at how SELCO evolved as an organization, the various challenges it faced along the way and the unconventional ways by which it overcame them. We end the chapter by discussing what may be some of the lessons that social enterprises can learn from SELCO's journey.
THE EARLY DAYS
Harish got the idea of bringing solar lighting systems to rural India when he was doing his PhD on sustainable energy at the University of Massachusetts in the USA. During a field visit to the Dominican Republic, he was surprised to find poor villagers using solar lighting and reasoned that if it was possible there, he should be able to bring solar lights to the rural poor in India too.
References
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1 - Introduction
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
This book is about organizations that positively impact the lives of the poor through their businesses. Therefore, I call their business models inclusive. Normally, businesses are not supposed to worry about poverty. The raison d’être of businesses, by which I imply for-profit commercial enterprises, is to maximize shareholders’ wealth. We assume that it is the responsibility of the government and some not-for-profit organizations to address the needs of the poor. Therefore, the organizations that are the subject matter of the book are a relatively new breed and somewhat paradoxical – they want to solve one of mankind's toughest problems, poverty, by deploying business principles. They want to create a positive social impact without depending on grants or charities; they want to maintain financial sustainability without maximizing profitability. What is the need for such organizations, how they can achieve, if at all, this dual objective and what have been the challenges in their journeys so far are worth knowing, debating and disseminating because this innovative organization form might just be an answer to many of the open questions that the world faces today in its battle with growing economic inequality despite rising global prosperity.
This book is mostly written in the context of India with one case study from Nepal and a few references to Bangladesh. However, I have discussed the subject matter of this book with several international audiences and most of them could derive insights from these that could be translated to their own contexts, such as Connecticut, Johannesburg, Sao Paolo or Seville. Therefore, I am hopeful that the inclusive business models that I describe and analyse in this book will have important lessons for anyone who wants to engage with the problem of poverty, irrespective of their geographic location.
INDIA TODAY: POISED FOR A DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDEND OR A DEMOGRAPHIC DISASTER?
India has made rapid economic progress during the last 25 years, post the liberalization of its economy. However, one problem that remains intractable is that of poverty. While estimates vary, there are still a significant number of people in India who are below or live perilously close to the poverty line. It was assumed that with the economic progress of the country, levels of poverty would reduce through the trickle-down effect.
12 - Bringing it All Together
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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The for-profit model of social enterprises has its share of criticism. For example, Anand Giridharadas (2019) argues that the market-driven capitalistic system is largely responsible for creating the inequality that we see around us. Social enterprises are attempting to solve problems of poverty and inequality by embracing principles of market. However, it is unrealistic to expect that the same market mechanisms will be able to solve the problems of inequality that were created in the first place because of them. Market mechanisms will only ensure status quo of inequality and shift the focus away from the responsibility of the government and regulations. Almost a similar argument was made by Karnani in his criticism of Prahlad's fortune at the bottom of the pyramid model, which we discussed in the first chapter. While the social entrepreneurs discussed in this book cannot be blamed for inequalities of the capitalistic system by any stretch of imagination, Giridharadas's argument definitely has a lot of merit. For example, the distress that was witnessed in the Indian microfinance sector, as discussed in Chapter 4, can be viewed as a direct consequence of applying market principles to the sector, which subordinated the social objectives with which microlending was started. Likewise, SELCO's founder Harish Hande has very often spoken about the expectation of markets regarding scale to achieve financial sustainability. In one of the private conversations, he noted that while SELCO was often told to ‘scale up to be financially sustainable’, a large global bank had to fire 11,000 of its employees across multiple geographies to remain financially viable. Thus, there are multiple examples of organizations needing to ‘scale down to be financially sustainable’. One must be careful about the extent one wants to apply market principles to govern social enterprises because, in many cases, wisdom of the markets might do more harm than good.
ROLE OF DIFFERENT ORGANIZATION FORMS
While almost all the case studies discussed in this book are about social enterprises that intend to be financially viable by embracing many market-based principles and best practices of commercial enterprises, they are by no means the panacea for solving the problems of poverty and inequality.
7 - Hasiru Dala Innovations: Improving Lives of Waste Pickers
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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Summary
India faces a huge challenge in waste management, which is a direct consequence of industrialization and urbanization. Four hundred million urban Indians living in about 8,000 towns and cities generate 62 million tonnes (MT) of municipal solid waste annually. While solid waste management should be one of the basic services provided by municipal authorities in order to keep urban centres clean, almost all such bodies deposit solid waste in dumping grounds within or outside cities haphazardly. Thus, only 43 MT of waste is collected, 12 MT is treated, and 31 MT is dumped in landfill sites (Lahiry 2019). Reports have pointed out that there was potential for recovering at least 15 per cent of the waste generated every day in India, which could provide employment to about 500,000 waste pickers. In many cities, waste collection is done informally where waste pickers collect solid waste from doorsteps, sometimes against a collection fee, and derive income by selling the recyclables. Thus, the informal recycling industry plays a significant role in waste management and ensures that less waste reached the landfills.
However, the economic condition of thousands of waste pickers, who are the foot soldiers of this enormous and critical operation of waste management, is possibly the worst among all professions in the country. They operate in harsh working conditions and are exposed to health hazards, accidents and crises of all kinds. They live in slums, which often lack access to basic infrastructure, such as electricity, clean water and sanitation. They traditionally belong to the lower castes, have low social status and are exploited by contractors and intermediaries. Civil society, municipal authorities and law enforcement agencies view them with hostility, which has prevented them from being integrated with any kind of formal system. Studies indicated that the average life expectancy of a waste picker was 39 years, their income was less than a dollar a day and there was 33 per cent infant mortality among their families.
In this chapter, we discuss about Hasiru Dala Innovations Private Limited (HDI), a social enterprise that offers waste management services primarily to bulk waste generators in the city of Bengaluru.
11 - Gujarat Narmada Fertilizer Company’s (Gnfc) Neem Initiative: A Social Business
- Sourav Mukherji, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
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- Book:
- Inclusive Business Models
- Published online:
- 31 July 2021
- Print publication:
- 09 December 2021, pp 267-284
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- Chapter
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Summary
Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus pioneered the term ‘social business’, defining it as ‘a no-dividend company dedicated to solving human problems’ (Yunus 2017). Conceptually, social businesses are very similar to inclusive business models that we have described so far in the book. However, the examples given by Dr Yunus are about social businesses that are incubated as ventures within or by for-profit enterprises, such as Grameen Danone created by Groupe Danone of France. Thus, these inclusive businesses are created in a unique context, where being conceived by a commercial entity results in some advantages as well as some new challenges for them. In this chapter, we will talk about one such initiative undertaken by the Gujarat Narmada Fertilizer Company (GNFC).
GNFC is one of the large chemical and fertilizer companies in India, with a turnover of INR 61 billion in the 2017–18 financial year. GNFC was established in 1976 with the primary purpose of manufacturing urea and nitrogenous fertilizers. By 2017–18, though it had diversified into energy and information technology, 90 per cent of its revenue and profits came from fertilizer and chemicals, with urea being one of its most important products. In India, urea is a government-subsidized commodity, meant to be used by farmers as an essential fertilizer in agriculture. However, significant quantities of subsidized urea used to be diverted from farming for use in chemical factories as low-cost input, often resulting in shortage of urea for agriculture.
A few years ago, a report prepared by the Agricultural Development and Rural Transformation Centre, Bengaluru, suggested that coating urea with neem oil would improve soil health and reduce pests and crop disease, thereby decreasing the need to use pesticides. More significantly, it would also make the urea unusable for non-fertilizer applications, and thus prevent diversion (Ramappa and Manjunatha 2017).
Apart from preventing diversion, the coating of urea with neem oil was expected to increase usage efficiency by preventing the evaporation of urea into the atmosphere and its leaching into the soil and water. It was estimated that more than half of the nitrogen present in urea was not assimilated by crops because of various factors, including ammonia volatilization. Neem had properties that reduced losses by slowing down the process of nitrate formation.