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The five things that social investor and entrepreneur Narayan Ramachandran has always wanted from life are "curiosity, balance, family, contribution and fun". In his current role as founder of InKlude Labs and a stakeholder in several entities that promote social justice, Ramachandran, former country head of global financial services firm Morgan Stanley, gets a chance to fulfil each of these goals.
Ramachandran and his partner Sriram Raghavan founded InKlude Labs in early 2011 with the aim of using it as a forum to scale up proven interventions in areas such as health and education. Ramachandran calls InKlude an "idea factory", which works as a traditional incubator does for start-ups - it picks up ideas that can be scaled easily and solve key development problems. InkLude's first project came about through a chance meeting between Ramachandran, Raghavan and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founders of the MIT Poverty Action Lab -- a network of professors from around the globe whose mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring policy is based on scientific evidence. Duflo and Banerjee got the InKlude guys interested in the Deworm the World initiative, a global plan to provide schoolchildren with a deworming tablet/solution that would ensure better health, attendance at school, lower dropout rates and, in the long term, a better chance at being productive members of society.
The initiative has been a resounding success in three Indian states. In Bihar alone, where chief minister Nitish Kumar approached Deworm the World and InKlude to rid 21 million school-age children of intestinal worms, 20 million schoolchildren have benefited with one tablet each that will ensure they remain worm-free for the next year. Deworm the World has also been implemented in Delhi and Madhya Pradesh and reached 35 million children in India. The reason it wasn't tried out in southern states like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, explains Ramachandran, is because according to WHO protocol, children with a worm-load of more than 20% need deworming medication, and in these states, worm-loads are much lower, both in rural areas and among the urban poor.
Ramachandran says his role in creating InKlude Labs was to "grease the wheels" - his personal financial investment in the organization was "not huge". Borrowing a term from the start-up ecosystem, Ramachandran says he provided "Base 0 funding". The organization and its Section 25 arm, Action Foundation, are supported by several philanthropists and the global non-profit research org, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Besides his work with InKlude, Ramachandran also sits on the board of a few social enterprises, such as the Arghyam Trust run by Rohini Nilekani, and has been director of Ratnakar Bank Ltd. since 2010 and Janalakshmi Financial Services Private Limited since March 2010. He is also co-chairman of Unitus Capital, which develops finance structures and raises capital for entrepreneurial businesses benefiting those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. His interest in policy-driven change also led him to be part of the management committee at Takshashila Institution, a Bangalore-based non-partisan think-tank and school of public policy.
Is it easy to do what he did -- give up a bright career with a prestigious global investment bank to worry about the logistics of creating a health programme in one of the most red tape riddled bureaucracies of the world? Ramachandran laughs, "It wasn't a tough decision. It was something I'd wanted to do for a long time, and I've never regretted it." What he brings is a "detached, unemotional" approach to problem-solving, and having spent four years in India with Morgan Stanley, and created some of its verticals from the ground up (fixed income, investment banking and wealth management), he decided to approach India's development problems with the same technocratic efficiency and focus.
PUTTING A SIMPLE PLAN IN ACTION
It's a very simple plan — 1 tablet, 1 child, 1 year. It's easy to execute, despite its large scale, and its effects can be monitored and evaluated. It isn't an idea that will get mired in institutionalized opposition — most people would support it or at worst, be neutral to it. These are the kind of ideas that excite us. Our aim is to focus on ideas that are eminently doable, that solve a real problem in a simple, effective way. The narrower the idea, the easier its implementation. No emotion. No guilt. Just a simple desire to see results and be motivated in the corporate sense. I have no messianic need to help people, just the need to meet these challenges and get the job done.
Ramachandran and his partner Sriram Raghavan founded InKlude Labs in early 2011 with the aim of using it as a forum to scale up proven interventions in areas such as health and education. Ramachandran calls InKlude an "idea factory", which works as a traditional incubator does for start-ups - it picks up ideas that can be scaled easily and solve key development problems. InkLude's first project came about through a chance meeting between Ramachandran, Raghavan and Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, professors at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founders of the MIT Poverty Action Lab -- a network of professors from around the globe whose mission is to reduce poverty by ensuring policy is based on scientific evidence. Duflo and Banerjee got the InKlude guys interested in the Deworm the World initiative, a global plan to provide schoolchildren with a deworming tablet/solution that would ensure better health, attendance at school, lower dropout rates and, in the long term, a better chance at being productive members of society.
The initiative has been a resounding success in three Indian states. In Bihar alone, where chief minister Nitish Kumar approached Deworm the World and InKlude to rid 21 million school-age children of intestinal worms, 20 million schoolchildren have benefited with one tablet each that will ensure they remain worm-free for the next year. Deworm the World has also been implemented in Delhi and Madhya Pradesh and reached 35 million children in India. The reason it wasn't tried out in southern states like Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, explains Ramachandran, is because according to WHO protocol, children with a worm-load of more than 20% need deworming medication, and in these states, worm-loads are much lower, both in rural areas and among the urban poor.
Ramachandran says his role in creating InKlude Labs was to "grease the wheels" - his personal financial investment in the organization was "not huge". Borrowing a term from the start-up ecosystem, Ramachandran says he provided "Base 0 funding". The organization and its Section 25 arm, Action Foundation, are supported by several philanthropists and the global non-profit research org, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). Besides his work with InKlude, Ramachandran also sits on the board of a few social enterprises, such as the Arghyam Trust run by Rohini Nilekani, and has been director of Ratnakar Bank Ltd. since 2010 and Janalakshmi Financial Services Private Limited since March 2010. He is also co-chairman of Unitus Capital, which develops finance structures and raises capital for entrepreneurial businesses benefiting those at the bottom of the economic pyramid. His interest in policy-driven change also led him to be part of the management committee at Takshashila Institution, a Bangalore-based non-partisan think-tank and school of public policy.
Is it easy to do what he did -- give up a bright career with a prestigious global investment bank to worry about the logistics of creating a health programme in one of the most red tape riddled bureaucracies of the world? Ramachandran laughs, "It wasn't a tough decision. It was something I'd wanted to do for a long time, and I've never regretted it." What he brings is a "detached, unemotional" approach to problem-solving, and having spent four years in India with Morgan Stanley, and created some of its verticals from the ground up (fixed income, investment banking and wealth management), he decided to approach India's development problems with the same technocratic efficiency and focus.
PUTTING A SIMPLE PLAN IN ACTION
It's a very simple plan — 1 tablet, 1 child, 1 year. It's easy to execute, despite its large scale, and its effects can be monitored and evaluated. It isn't an idea that will get mired in institutionalized opposition — most people would support it or at worst, be neutral to it. These are the kind of ideas that excite us. Our aim is to focus on ideas that are eminently doable, that solve a real problem in a simple, effective way. The narrower the idea, the easier its implementation. No emotion. No guilt. Just a simple desire to see results and be motivated in the corporate sense. I have no messianic need to help people, just the need to meet these challenges and get the job done.
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