January 24th, 2012 
Ziaulla Namani
“At least five African countries are looking at Indian models of development to solve the problems at the bottom of the pyramid” as Western models were not scalable, said Pitroda, adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on public information infrastructure and innovations.
Addressing 100 young social innovators at Action For India Forum 2012, Pitroda said India was in a unique position to solve the problems of the poor as it had the largest number of poor and a huge amount of talent to address challenges.
“There is a lot of talent solving the problems of the rich. Innovations are needed to solve the problem of the poor,” he told the entrepreneurs and asked them to focus on technology that can make social enterprises scale their operations to get them more pervasive in coverage and impact.
Pitroda said the union and state governments were taking steps to support social entrepreneurs to set up new business models.
“To support social entrepreneurs set up new business models to bring about change, efforts are underway to increase the corpus of National Innovation Fund as soon as it collects Rs.500 crore.”
The fund is expected to be operational by June-to-July, 2012 and would include Rs.100 core that was announced by Finance Minister Pranab Mukerjee.
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