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An overview of speech delivered by Mr. Pranjal Dubey

1 BACKGROUND
Pranjal Dubey was a software engineer at SAP lab for around 12 years. Though he has traveled many
countries in Western world and witnessed the modern India, there is another identity of him to the people
of his village Sandalpur and other subsequent villages. He is the mohant in Dewas district of Madhya
Pradesh. He is the carrier of this legacy of more than two hundred years. In festive time, tens of thousands
of people come to his house to wash and touch his feet. From the young age he felt uncomfortable about
this ritual and a question arose at the back of his mind, What I can do for these people? That area is one
of the poorest area in India and half of the population is tribal. On top of that, girls never went to college.
Even the boys could not find out any value of their degree because they could not get a job. Thousands of
people in rural India are facing the problem of lack of proper education system. Sometimes they purchase
an engineering degree by selling their hereditary land.

On 2006, I entered into The Seven-year Itch. After seven years, you get
something that whatever you are doing, you are not happy doing that. One
day Professor Ram said to me very nicely, Thousands of people in your
village are touching your feet and here you are touching others feet. The choice
become very clear about what I want to do in life
In July 2010, Sant Singaji Institute of Science and Management (SSISM) came into being in his village
Sandalpur, 88KM from Bhopal. The college was setup primarily for the industry oriented value addition
with traditional educational stream like science, arts, commerce etc. Since 2010, more than 1100 students
have enrolled with marginal attrition rate and 95% success rate in final examination under Vikram
University, Madhya Pradesh.

2 BRIEF TIMELINE OF SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP

The journey started with the foundation of the institute SSISM on July 2010. Primarily it offered degree
courses and from 2012 it started offering PG courses as well. On the same year Babulalji Makharia Unnati
Center was founded to provide job oriented skill training for unemployed rural youth. On 2014, a primary
education center was founded to train the youth from the beginning as a long term holistic education goal
in backward integration process. For next five year 2016-20, the target is set for small scale industries like
Dairy Farming, Bio-Energy, IT/ Village BPO, Tele Medicine, and local small scale industries for employment.

3 THE INSTITUTE AND VALUE ADDITION TO SOCIETY

The institute was founded in July 2010 on 15 acres of land at the village of Sadalpurpur, Madhyapradesh.
It offers degree cources personality development, spoken english, carrer guidance, and vocational courses.
The institute also act as a Local Information Center (ICT) as within 50km of radius there is no internet

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connectivity except in SSISM. Right now, the institute offers degree (B.Sc.) on Science and industry oriented
courses in Computer Science, Microbiology, Business Administration, Commerce (B.Com.) and Arts (B.A).

Provide practical education to rural students so that they develop into good and
confident citizens, to help them achieve their dreams and also contribute to the
socio-economic environment.
All the courses are equipped with high levels of industry connect to build industry related skills within the
course so that the relevant industry could hire skilled professionals. The numbers prove the success of the
institution. The ratio of girl students has increased to 55-60% where in Dewas district hardly any girl
attended college before. Till date 13 university toppers came from the institute among 155 colleges under
Vikram University and all of them are girl. With more than ten placement into top MNCs like SAP Labs,
Wipro, Cognizant, Mphasis, the institute has successfully placed more than hundred candidates in local
service and product related businesses. The vocational training went into a huge success and till now they
have trained more than four thousand youth for free. Overall, with more than thousand people are now
working on one fifty villages to create rural empowerment by providing quality education and employment
opportunity which will lead to sustainable development in rural India.

4 CHALLENGES
One of the major challenges is convincing the parents to send their girl child for college even though the
girl has scored far better than the boy child. Moreover, the placement of the girl student is really a problem
because their parents do not want to send their girl child to city for employment purpose.

The boy who scored 58% goes to an engineering college, however the girl who
scored 85% comes to Singaji College.
Financing the entire system is the prime problem till the inception. On a statics, only 400 students have
paid their full fee which is very minimum out of 100 students. For the capacity build up like school building,
hostel for boys and girls, or even going cost like transportation finance is the major roadblock.
The income is based on government dependence and the payment of fees is based on the agricultural
output of that year. These conditions are the resistance on the process of self-sustainability of the
institution.
As the institute offers little monetary incentives, getting and retaining quality faculty is a challenge.
Moreover, training of those teacher and unavailability of content in rural aptitude is a going concern.

5 CONCLUSION
Pranjal Dube has leveraged his tremendous social capital which he has achieved as hereditary asset and
build a social organizational model to provide quality education and employment opportunity. The
beginning revenue model is not self-sustainable as it was from personal philanthropy. However, the
founder couldnt move away from philanthropic model of revenue by external grants etc. to make it selfsustainable. Apart of revenue model, SSISM has achieved significance importance in terms rural
empowerment in modern India.