Stanford graduate to set up social impact incubators

Vijay C Roy

Tribune News Service

Mohali, March 8

After training 14,000 youths and farmers spread across five states, a 36-year-old Stanford graduate in social entrepreneurship from Batala (Gurdaspur) has plans to tackle social issues confronting Punjab and the country as a whole.

Param Singh, founder of Monsoon Impact Incubator and UDAY, a social enterprise, intends to set up first-of-its-kind social impact incubators in the state.

He has signed an MoU with the state government for setting up two incubators in Mohali and Amritsar.

The first incubator will come up in Amritsar in the next three months, followed by Mohali. The incubator will select, support and scale impact-driven entrepreneurs to solve society’s most pressing challenges. The company intends to incubate 50 social impact entrepreneurs by 2020.

“Monsoon Impact Incubator will be the state’s first-of-its-kind ‘profit with purpose’ social impact incubator. Our vision is to incubate 50 social impact entrepreneurs who will collaboratively change 10 million lives before 2025.

Aiming gender equality, the impact incubator will also encourage women social entrepreneurs,” said Param Singh on the sidelines of TiECon 2018 Summit organised by the Chandigarh Chapter of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneur).

He added, “The social entrepreneurs will tackle social issues such as raising farmers’ income, agriculture (ensuring zero farmer suicide in Punjab before 2022), food processing, livelihood, child education, health and nutrition, women empowerment, clean energy, water and soil health and sustainable development goals.”

Param Singh said, “The idea behind setting up these incubators is to assist social entrepreneurs from tier 2 and 3 cities in Punjab. We will collaborate and network with highly qualified and successful mentors from around the globe, including Australia, Singapore, US, Canada, UK and Hong Kong.”

“We will also help them grow by providing access to finance from the growing global impact investment funds,” he added.

His social enterprise, UDAY, has trained around 14,000 youths, including farmers from Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh. For training individuals, it has entered into an agreement with National Skill Development Corporation. UDAY will soon enter Himachal Pradesh to train the youth.

Tech way to tackle shortage of teachers 

Navdeep Singh Gill, founder of software company Xenon Stack, proposed to Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh a way of dealing with the shortage of teachers. He said, “Using cloud technology, a maths or science teacher in Ludhiana can simultaneously deliver a lecturer to students in a Tarn Taran school where there is no teacher.” He added, “We intend to set up a lab in Mohali if the state government provides us infrastructure. It will help the government save the expenditure on setting up computer labs in various schools, besides monitoring attendance.”