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Archana Venkat

Chennai March 13 The Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurial Development at Indian School of Business (ISB) has come up with a business model for a `Social Investment Bank.'

The core of this flexible model is to make banking services simpler for rural people. "The model per se is different for every project. On a macro level it will look at how sustainable social projects can be funded," said Dr V. Chandrasekar, Executive Director, Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurial Development.

For instance, the Centre is exploring options of paying insurance premium via the cell phone. "We are working with Nokia and other players to see if handsets can incorporate applications that will allow people in rural areas to pay insurance, carry out their banking activities and trade," he told Business Line. Today, it takes about 20 days for money from rural India to reach the insurance company. With phone-based payments, this could take a few hours or less, he says.

The Centre has also been helping small companies expand business. One such project is the `Jaipur Foot' artificial limb. "We have helped them develop a sustainable business model and plan to create a separate company to expand business to other parts of India," said Dr Chandrasekar. Since the implementation of the model is still going on, he did not want to give details of it.

The Centre has also adopted 10 small manufacturing companies and is teaching them basic economics and finance related aspects such as re-investment and scaling up. "Small companies in rural India are unable to grow because they spend all their energies on managing existing resources. So we aid them in management training. Our students are also encouraged to take up projects with the rural and social sectors," he said.

Entrepreneurship is also supported and resources to fund ideas are made available. In the past, HSBC and other banks have funded project ideas by ISB students.

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