Making Ordinary People Extra-ordinary

One of the biggest challenges faced by ordinary people is that they are unaware of their own capabilities and potential; and cannot rise beyond the mundane. Especially in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, people hardly get to avail an opportunity, identify and test their ideas and create a difference.

In line with this concept, Dr. Gururaj Deshpande came to India with an idea called Sandbox, that is based on the relevance of social innovation in India. Dr. Desh, in the Kakatiya Sandbox Development Dialogue 2016, shared his ideas on the same note.

He said, “The beauty of entrepreneurship is that it opens up a lot of capabilities within you that you didn’t know you have. It is the ability to take on a mission and do something that makes you feel that your capabilities are expanding. When we were thinking of doing something good through Deshpande Foundation, we realized that the biggest gift we could give to people was to make them feel that they were a lot more capable. It is to make ordinary people do extraordinary things. It is also a good approach to solve problems. Entrepreneurs need to start working on the problems they see. If the solution works in one place, make it work in more places. Once the impact of the solution becomes obvious, it is for the government to take the model and replicate it in more places. The world needs 75 million entrepreneurs to really run the economy over the next 10 years. India needs 10 million entrepreneurs. There has to be entrepreneurship everywhere.”

So, the whole idea of the Sandbox is to create an entrepreneurial world where each and everyone strives to solve the problem till the time when there would be no more unsolved problems. The best way to bring out the best version of people in semi-urban and rural areas is to provide them a platform to test their ideas. With every problem they undertake and solve, they create a proof-of-model solution that can be replicated to solve similar challenges in a different community, thereby broadening the impact.