Munni Devi was resigned to a life of deprivation. As a farm labourer on the outskirts of Lucknow, the earnings were meagre. She also had to take care of two grandchildren. Three years back, she became a pashu sakhi (friend of livestock) after receiving training. Since then she has been earning...

Prakash Agarwal’s life is currently balanced on a knife-edge. The 14-year-old from Nagpur has experienced two grand mal seizures over the past six months. Doctors suspect epilepsy and advised him to undergo Video-EEG or electroencephalogram test to chart his brain’s electrical activity. A year has passed since an appointment for...

The fishermen of Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu were faced with a double whammy in April 2020. As the lockdown shrunk their business, nearly a third of the catch rotted away. Even when they were desperately looking for ice to save the fish, the cold storages remained off-limits for them. This...

Pranav Chopra, a product development engineer, and Neeraj Kumar, an industrial designer, were complete strangers when they met at the Stanford-India Biodesign Innovation fellowship programme held at AIIMs, Delhi, in 2014. Six years later, they are giving finishing touches to a medical device that has the potential to significantly improve...

Agriculture employs more than half of India’s population and generates the majority of income for most rural families. While India leads the globe in the production of spices, pulses, milk and fruit, the sector contributes merely 18 per cent to the GDP. Most Indian farmers lead a fraught existence with...

Menstrual or sanitary waste is one of the biggest issues the waste management industry is facing today. With no way to recycle, sanitary napkins lie in the landfills or are disposed in our water bodies, producing infections and lying untreated for 400-500 years. These used pads are also seen choking...

In our lifetime, the discussion of climate change has escaped the academic world of research papers and conference rooms to stare us in the face at every turn. It is here and it is real and the story seems dark. The only silver lining on this cloud is the growing...

To understand what Learning Matters – an EdTech start-up incubated by Social Alpha – is trying to achieve, one needs to go down to the first principles. Any instance of an education experience comprises of a student-teacher building block. Any education ecosystem comprises of millions of such well-executed building blocks....