SHILLONG, March 03: Vijay Mahajan, 59, founder and CEO of the BASIX Social Enterprise Group, which has promoted livelihoods of over two million poor households, interacted with the student community at Asian Confluence Centre on Monday evening. This talk and interaction with Mahajan and acknowledged as one of the pioneers of livelihood development and one of the leading forth leaders of India promises to be an eye opener to explore new paradigms of growth and new career options for the 21st century balancing using indigenous knowledge and local resources to create global brands and mass employment opportunities.
He encouraged the students to develop skills on social entrepreneurship which is one of the most important requirement and lucrative profession today. He also spoke about the use of technology in developing projects and the need for overall cross disciplinary development.
He founded BSAIX in 1996 which offers financial services, agricultural and livestock development, vocational training, renewable energy and climate change adaptation services to low-income households; and institutional development services to groups of women and agricultural producers. In 1983, Vijay founded PRADAN, a livelihood promotion NGO, and led it till the end 1990. Between PRADAN and BASIX, Vijay studied the rural non-farm sector and financial services for women and the poor.
In his closing remarks, the Asian Confluence director Sabyasachi Dutta said that the centre started this series of talk aimed at students by important personalities to enable them to get a holistic view across disciplines. This talk series featuring prominent personalities from the business and media world is a great success admired by all. Many students got an eye opener in the field of social entrepreneurship. The director of Sikkim Manipal University Gagan Jain earlier introduced the speaker.
Vijay served on the boards of major Indian NGOs and policy forums such as the Rangarajan Committee on Financial Inclusion (2007-08), Raghuram Rajan Committee on Financial Sector Reforms (2008-09) and the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (2005-10). He is a distinguished alumnus of both the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and a Mid-Career Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA. He was selected among “the 60 outstanding social entrepreneurs of the world” at the World Economic Forum, Davos in 2003, among “the 50 most influential Indians” by Business Week, Asia in 2009, and among “the twenty Indians who will lead India’s reforms this decade”, by the Financial Express in 2011.(SP News)
