IIT Reach 4 India

The Context

The 9% India growth story presents an ironical paradox –nearly every sector is facing huge human resources crunch on one side and there is rural under-employment, on the other side. Urban India is teeming with surplus financial capital and rural India is languishing with little business activity. It is these paradoxes that Reach 4 India seeks to bridge by making corporate India go rural and local for creating jobs and markets and in doing so use its own resources to ensure scalability. In the process, it would charge a human capital fee in terms of few personnel to implement PANIIT nation building initiatives on the ground level.

The Proposition

‘Reach 4 India’ is human capital channel for deploying self-sustainable and scalable nation building projects. Professionals on a one year employer sponsored sabbatical will be deployed across all the 5500 taluka’s of India to take these nation building initiatives to the local level. They would be adequately supported by the acharya structure consisting of volunteers (Ex-iitians/IAS, Retired professionals) and the IIT alumni network to provide governance, mentoring and other linkages with governments, corporates. One project per PAN IIT stream has been identified to go-to-market with:

The Sustainability

Major part of ‘Reach 4 India’ costs are the direct costs of its sevaks which are covered by the respective employers. This is more of an investment than cost for corporates as they would reap the benefits of better cost and value arbitrage by going rural/local. The organizational and other costs of full time Reach 4 India employees would be covered using CSR annuities/donor funds.

The Future Steps

Reach 4 India would follow 50 sevaks -500 sevak -5000 sevaks model to grow in 4 years: