Build For Bharat: Recent Episodes
Bharat Inclusion Initiative, CIIE.CO
Build For Bharat features bite-sized discussions with the Makers who are building India’s inclusive, digital future. The podcast is a part of the Bharat Inclusion Initiative from CIIE.CO, where we support entrepreneurs who are Building for Bharat with inclusive products.
About the Episode:
Marico Innovation Foundation is scaling Innovation in India by providing customized guidance for enabling organizations to achieve growth through scale-up programs and sectoral innovation programs. Join Priya Kapadia, Head of Marico Innovation Foundation in conversation with the host Sanjay Jain to know what innovation means to the foundation, the qualities contributing to a great mentor relationship, the innovation criteria considered while selecting a startup, and how the program helps in developing a scale-up plan by identifying key challenges.
About the Guest:
Priya Kapadia, Heads Marico Innovation Foundation (MIF), an initiative by Marico Ltd. with a mission to nurture innovation in India. Over the past 10 years, Priya has conceptualized multiple programs that support innovations in their journey towards creating real, measurable impact. Her repertoire includes sector and challenge specific programs in the form of #Innovate2Cultivate, to support innovation in agriculture and more recently the #Innovate2BeatCovid, in response to the ongoing pandemic. She plays a crucial role in transforming the foundation’s flagship programs, Innovation for India Awards, a benchmark awards platform and the flagship program - Scale-Up Program, which has helped 60+ innovators to scale, recognised 5+ potential unicorns with 100+ mentors in 15+ sectors. Priya harnesses her expertise and experience to bring together experts and thought leaders across fields to come together for the unified purpose of creating an innovation ecosystem that can empower innovators and help them to make a difference.
Priya has close to 20 years of experience in Business Planning, Brand Management, Promotions and Marketing Operations. She also has extensive experience in Advertising, Media Marketing and Financial Services. She enjoys independently conceptualizing and implementing programs encompassing mass media, activation and digital outreach. Before Marico Innovation Foundation, Priya has worked with organisations like Bennette Coleman and Co. Ltd., Citicorp Finance India Ltd, Citibank N.A and Rediffusion DY&R.
Priya has a strong work ethic and is continuously striving for improvement coupled with excellent administrative aptitude. She is proficient in analyzing market trends for formulating and implementing marketing strategies. She has launched award-winning marketing programs.
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About the Episode:
ONDC is a capability that helps create eCommerce solutions where buyers can search in terms of product, brand, or context, and find the solution they need. It is designed to streamline the future of digital commerce and provide opportunities to all sellers, no matter big or small.Join Shireesh Joshi on this episode with host Sanjay Jain as he explains how ONDC is a building block that will facilitate buyers to choose from many applications to purchase a product from the universe of sellers.
About the Guest:
Shireesh Joshi is Chief Business Officer for Open Network For Digital Commerce (ONDC). He is responsible for expanding the network in terms of participants and domains.
Previously he held roles with Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Airtel and Godrej, where he managed multiple brands, geographies and market positions simultaneously and worked on businesses across India, China and South Asia, working with various cultures and languages and has over 30 years of experience delivering successful results with organisations and teams of varying capability and scale.
An industry and function leader, he often speaks at industry conferences, serves on various marketing award juries. He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur and IIM Bangalore.
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About the Episode:
FASTag is a device that employs Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology for making toll payments directly while the vehicle is in motion. Today, FASTag is accepted at 964+ toll plazas on National & State Highways across the country, including both national and state highways, through 14 acquiring banks.Join Denny Thomas, the product head of FASTag with host Sanjay Jain as he talks about how FASTag was developed, why RFID technology was taken into consideration, and the key Indian conditions that led to one of the most successful digital payment implementations.
About the Guest:
Denny V Thomas is Head - NETC & AePS at National Payments Corporation of India. He has over 15 years of diverse experience in field of Product Management, Sales & Distribution of Transit Cards, Credit Cards, Loan Against Securities & Mobiles. Experienced manager with skills in leading direct as well as cross-functional teams. Proven ability to launch new markets & products, manage key account relationships, resolving channel conflicts, training and assisting sales team & channel partners.
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About the Episode:
Agristack is like an aadhaar for farmers as it is a collection of technologies and digital databases proposed by the Central Government focusing on Indian farmers and the agricultural sector. Join Mr. Rajeev Chawla with host Sanjay Jain as he explains how Agristack will enable the farmer’s crop and lands to be discovered, and how the farmer's data is the backbone to provide recommendations on their crop production.
About the Guest:
Rajeev Chawla is Strategic Advisor and Chief Knowledge Officer to Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare, Government of India. He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur who has won the First Prime Minister Award for excellence in Civil Service for Bhoomi project and the United Nations Public Service Award. Key projects he has worked on include Kutumba - the most comprehensive dynamic self updating registry of 1.75 crore families and about 5.5 crore citizens of Karnataka. The registry is being used for suo moto delivery of services and benefits to citizens. Govt of India is planning to create similar registries for all states. He has also worked on E-Sahamati, the consent framework based on DEPA framework of NITI Ayog. This is a digital public good which is open to use by all States. Other interventions by him have beenGIS/GPS mobile based crop survey, online crop insurance and Bhoomi , a project - under which 200 lakh records of 70 lakh farmers is now fully connected system with registration department, survey department, Banks and Land Acquisition bodies and is lifeline of Karnataka economy.
About the Episode:
Trade India is a platform with over 77 lakh digitally aggregated MSMEs, who use this platform to sell and buy. Join their CEO Sandip Chhettri with host, Sanjay Jain as he talks about enablement infrastructure and helping MSMEs navigate challenges in this aspect.
About the Guest:
Mr. Sandip Chhettri is one of India’s prime leaders in the MSME space, with nearly two decades of sectoral expertise. He is currently managing the overall operations & direct agendas to drive profitability for India's leading B2B marketplace, TradeIndia. Under his leadership, TradeIndia team has digitally transformed 77,00,000+ SMEs with a vision to enable 63 million SMBs with technology-driven solutions in the near future.
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About the Episode:
'Financial Inclusion for Bharat: Insights into People, Markets and Start-ups' is a compendium of insights from the lives of people of Bharat, extensive research studies on pressing questions about inclusion and cases that improve founders' decision-making. Featuring a variety of research forms including human stories from across the geography of India, insights and use cases based on extensive data, rigorous methods and case snapshots with focus on dilemma facing founders building financial inclusion startups, this is an incomparable source of insights and nuggets on the area of financial inclusion and what that means for Bharat.Join Supriya Sharma, Partner-Insights in a conversation with Sanjay Jain as she discusses this. Download the book from: https://www.globalfintechfest.com/theme/default/doc/GFF-financial-inclusion.pdf About the Guest:
Supriya Sharma is a Partner - Insights and leads the research vertical at CIIE.CO. She has built a function that delivers a toolbox for startups including research on emerging sectors, DIY tools and decision making frameworks. Insights at CIIE.CO also provides research backed inputs to incubators, investors, academia and other stakeholders in the Indian startup ecosystem. A research-practice translator, Supriya continues to publish her research in leading journals and teach courses on entrepreneurship at IIMs. Supriya is a Fellow of IIM Ahmedabad. Prior to her doctoral work, she had worked in the insurance industry in team leading and strategic roles and dabbled with academia. Supriya enjoys hindi-urdu poetry and cooking. She is also building a resource for caregivers in India.
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About the Episode:
A special episode on Build for Bharat podcast featuring Akshay Saxena, founder of Avanti fellows. Avanti runs India's largest interventions integrating technology to improve maths and Science achievements in secondary school. The episode was recorded live on 8th Aug 2022 by Daily Hunts in collaboration with MASH foundation as part of celebration of Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav, 75 years of Independence. Join Akshay as he chat with Sanjay on his journey forming Avanti fellows enabling young and talented students from low income background to get equitable access to high quality education.
About the Guest:
Akshay Saxena is a Teacher-Entrepreneur with a passion for helping build organizations that create an equitable world. Through Avanti we are helping teachers in 11 states across India transform Math and Science learning outcomes for India's 100M middle and high-school students through the use of collaborative learning and technology.
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About the Episode:
Bharat Bill Payment System is an integrated bill payment system in India offering interoperable and accessible bill payment service to customers through a network of agents of the registered members as Agent Institutions, enabling multiple payment modes, and providing instant confirmation of payment. Join Rahul Tandon as he shares how this brings one-touch billing to life with host, Sanjay Jain.
About the Guest:
Rahul Tandon is currently working as Head Product, Market Development and Compliance at NPCI Bharat Bill Pay Limited. He has three decades of experience. Two-decade-old development banker; worked in domains of credit, policy, IT, and inspections. Pioneer in the field of digital payments helped establish financial inclusion and merchant acquisition for a payments company. Serial entrepreneur and established businesses related to QR code, biometrics and business applications. Was part of the founding team that planned, wrote the guidelines and designed the product for BBPS.
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About the Episode:
Fostering innovation in the financial sector has always been interlinked with regulation. Last year, RBI set up an independent not for profit company with an independent board - the Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH) - to act in the interests of the ecosystem and working with all stakeholders, be it academia, FinTech or industry. Join RBIH's CEO Mr. Rajesh Bansal with host Sanjay Jain as they discuss RBIH's vision of frictionless finance for a billion Indians.
About the Guest:
Mr. Rajesh Bansal is the CEO of Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH). A highly regarded thought leader, he has nearly three decades of global experience in digital financial services and digital infrastructure across Asian and African markets.
Mr. Bansal is one of the key architects of India’s journey from a cash to cash-lite economy by actively promoting policies, strengthening institutions, governance framework, and designing new products and solutions for scale and adoption. He was a member of the founding team of Aadhaar and specifically led the design of India’s Direct Benefits Transfer system which is benefiting hundreds of millions of low-income clients. He played a key role in creating India Stack, a digital ID-based infrastructure for a presence less and cashless service delivery platform, and has been a member of several committees of Government of India and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI).
Prior to joining RBIH, he was a senior adviser at Carnegie India, where he led the centre’s Technology and Society programme. Mr. Bansal has previously served the RBI in various capacities, including in areas of technology, payment systems, and financial inclusion.
Mr. Bansal holds a Master’s degree from Duke University in International Development Policy, USA and has authored a number of articles and opinion pieces in leading publications. Today he commands the magnanimous position of being one of the Top 30 Indian fintech influencers in 2022 and has been a recipient of the prestigious Golden Jubilee scholarship scheme of the RBI.
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About the Episode:
We are not able to reach out to the bottom of the pyramid because it's not economically viable to do so. However, with India Stack, technology can enable greater access. Join Hrushikesh Mehta as he chats with Sanjay Jain on one such piece of the India Stack - Open Credit Enablement Network (OCEN).
About the Guest:
Hrushikesh Mehta is a Fellow at iSPIRT and Chief Evangelist, CredAll. He is responsible for driving the awareness and adoption of standardized Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that facilitate digital lending. The APIs are called the Open Credit Enablement Network or OCEN. There are many lending processes that have not been uniformly automated. OCEN's APIs standardize these so that ecosystem players like loan service providers (LSPs) and lenders can work together to create all-digital lending flows over the life cycle of the loan without needing custom integrations. All-digital loans reduce the cost of acquisition and hence enable cash flow based lending (sachet sized finance) which was previously unviable when manual processes were involved.
Prior to this Hrushikesh was responsible for building all aspects of ClearScore’s online credit and insurance market place business in India. In a career spanning 20 years – a majority of which were spent at TransUnion CIBIL - Hrushikesh has held leadership positions across product development, sales, marketing, operations, credit risk and vendor management. Prior to TransUnion CIBIL, he has worked with Quantum Equity Advisors where he actively participated in the fund raising process, United Shippers Limited where he was responsible for high-profile client interactions, Citigroup Private Bank where he recommended investment strategies for high net worth individuals, and Osram Sylvania Inc, USA. He also had a previous tenure with CIBIL.
Hrushikesh has a degree in Business Administration from Bryant University (USA) and a post-graduate degree in Management from Indian School of Business (Hyderabad).
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About the Episode:
BG Mahesh is passionate about building products to Bharat. He did this for two decades with Indian languages in digital media and is now co-founder at Sahamati, a collective of the Account Aggregator ecosystem. AAs give individuals greater control over their data and is a step towards financial inclusion in India. Join him with host Sanjay Jain on this episode of the build for bharat podcast to take a peek into Account Aggregators and the India Stack.
About the Guest:
BG Mahesh is the Cofounder and CEO of Sahamati. He did BE (Computer Science) from SJCE Mysore and MS (CS) from Univ of Alabama, Birmingham (US). Mahesh is the first one who built an internet portal for the Indian diaspora in the US (mahesh.com). As early as 2000, Mahesh focussed on Indian languages on the internet to reduce the digital divide.
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About the Episode:
Eko gives an opportunity to shop owners to turn into Banking & Financial institutions. Customers who do not have bank accounts and still want to transfer money using cash , pay their utility bills, have insurance and avail services you give. Join Abhishek Sinha with Sanjay jain on this episode of the Build for Bharat podcast as they discuss service networks that have arisen due to the collaborative efforts put in by Eko
About the Guest:
Abhishek is one of the Co founders of Eko and started Eko in 2007. Prior to Eko, Abhishek had cofounded 6d Technologies - a telecom software product company. Abhishek graduated as Bachelor of Engineering Electronics and Communication Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, Ranchi. At Eko, he is a big proponent of open source and open platform which allows of collaboration with developers and product managers beyond Eko. He further champions video, voice and vernacular at Eko as he believes that this is key to acquire and democratically serve the next billion customers.
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About the Episode:
Beckn is the base protocol layer that powers ONDC - which is in the news today. While many have not heard of it, Sanjay spoke with Ravi Prakash, the Head of Architecture & Technology Ecosystem, and asked him to explain it in a simple way - as if the listener was 5 years old. Listen in at Build for Bharat podcast and join the conversation.
About the Guest:
Ravi Prakash is currently working as the Head of Architecture and Technology Ecosystem at Beckn Foundation. Ravi is the genesis author of beckn protocol specification, current administrator of the core working group that maintains beckn protocol, and volunteer at Beckn Open Collective. He also work as a protocol advisor to projects like Open Network for Digital Commerce, the Kochi Open Mobility Network, and the Unified Health Interface.
Ravi comes from a very hardware oriented background. He graduated with a Masters Degree in Embedded Systems from BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus after obtaining his Bachelor's Degree Engineering from Anna University, Chennai.
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About the Episode:
This episode of Build for Bharat talks about enabling GIG workers to execute their technical last-mile services. Dheeraj Khatter, co-founder of MyMobiForce, addresses how there was no digital identity created for them, building a platform that connects businesses to the technicians. Join Sanjay Jain to learn how they are removing middle men and bringing more opportunities.
About the Guest:
Dheeraj Khatter is the Founder and CEO@MyMobiForce, an organized full-stack service marketplace that has helped over 100 enterprises & OEMs connect with a skilled technical workforce across India. He used to work with big multinational names like HCL, AT&T, T-MO, NEC, etc., in countries such as the USA, UK, & JAPAN, where he built his expertise in SALES, ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT, and GROWTH STRATEGY, before starting on his serial entrepreneurship journey. When he is not busy building his ventures, he can be spotted strumming his guitar or taking long strolls at beaches.
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About the Episode:
This Build for Bharat podcast episode gives an insight into what led Ruchit Garg, Founder and CEO of Harvesting Farmer Network, build this platform that provides farmers with many fold larger market access and better price realization by online bidding. Join the host Sanjay Jain as he finds out how HFN leverages technology and utilises remote sensing data to help the farmers.
About the Guest:
Ruchit G Garg is the founder and CEO of Harvesting Farmer Network, an initiative focused on providing market linkages to smallholder farmers in India. Ruchit worked in the USA for over 11-years in companies like Microsoft and moved to India to work with smallholder farmers in India. HFN has connected farmers from 30 Indian states on the digital platform mobilizing over $500 million USD worth of crops in less than two years. Ruchit holds Masters in Computer Application and has received a “President Award” from the President of India late Shri S. D. Sharma for his services as ‘scout’. Ruchit is an advisor to technology startups and has spoken at several national & international conferences.
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About the Episode:
In this episode of Build for Bharat podcast, co-founder of NowFloats Jasminder Singh Gulati in a conversation with Host Sanjay Jain, talks about how they are building a platform which simplifies the digital journey of every business in Bharat. Tune in to discover the challenges faced by NowFloats as they Build for Bharat.
About the Guest:
Jasminder has over 25 years of experience in the technology industry spanning multiple responsibilities and geographies. Before incubating NowFloats, Jasminder was VP & Head of Global Delivery at CA Technologies, responsible for establishing and growing revenue from services and products. He joined CA Technologies from Microsoft Corporation, where in his 12 year tenure he held a number of roles spanning sales and marketing of products to professional services. In his last role at Microsoft, he was the Director - International Markets at Microsoft Global Services with responsibility of global delivery business across EMEA and Asia regions. Just before this, he helped incubate Microsoft Global Services as Director of Operations & Strategy. He has held other leadership positions at Microsoft India and Asia including Head of Enterprise Marketing for India and Business Manager for Asia Services. While at Microsoft, Jas has been the recipient of multiple global recognitions including from the Chairman/CEO of the company. Jasminder started his career at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) where he spent over 3 years on building India’s first global software product for the financial services industry. Jasminder holds a Bachelor’s Degree (Honors) in Computer Science from University of Bombay with majors in Artificial Intelligence. Jasminder is an active investor and mentor to startups, and works very closely with the Govt of India. He is passionate about simplifying technology and is loves books, heritage and all things vintage.
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About the Episode:
Signzy facilitates 10 million+ end-user and corporate onboardings each month, with a 99% success rate, while reducing time to market from 6 months to 3-4 weeks. In this episode of the Build for Bharat podcast, co-founder Ankit Ratan discusses Signzy, a worldwide digital trust platform, with host Sanjay Jain.
About the Guest:
Ankit Ratan graduated from IIT Delhi in 2011 with a silver medal. Having worked in data analytics firms at New York and Shanghai for a few years, he realised that his heart lay in India and he decided to settle and build a global company out of India. Today, he is building Signzy, a market-leading digital banking infrastructure provider that is redefining the speed, accuracy, and experience of how financial institutions are onboarding customers and businesses - using the digital medium. Signzy in its short Journey has won awards from RBI, Monetary Authority of Singapore, IBM, Thomson Reuters and was also judged as Forbes 30 under 30.
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About the Episode:
The co-founder and CTO of PhonePe, Rahul Chari, discusses the value of emphasizing User engagement and customer experience on this episode of the BuildForBharat podcast. Listen in at...
About the Guest:
Rahul is the co-founder and CTO at PhonePe. He is a serial entrepreneur in the consumer internet space and has built PhonePe into one of India’s fastest growing and largest fintech companies. He comes with over two decades of experience in consumer internet and enterprise software space. He has strong experience in building world-class tech platforms for web-scale, continuously scaling systems to deal with hyper-growth and evolving the processes and practices to meet the demands of a fast-growing organization.
His areas of expertise include digital payments & commerce platforms (Mobile payments, Fintech, Digital Media platforms, Websites/Mobile Apps, ECommerce Supply Chain Systems) and Embedded Systems (SAN Switching, Storage Virtualization, SAN-based RAID), Enterprise S/W Development (SAN-based Data Migration, Remote Replication, iSCSI, IP over FC, FC2-4 stack). Prior to PhonePe, Rahul was at Flipkart as Vice President of Engineering. He joined Flipkart in 2011 through the acquisition of Mallers Inc. He spearheaded the Supply Chain technology division at Flipkart. In his role, he was responsible for building the best-in-class supply chain management system for e-commerce covering order management, warehousing & transport management and eCommerce fulfilment innovation to create value for customers at Flipkart.
Prior to Flipkart, Rahul co-founded Mallers, Inc. in 2009 and served as its Chief Technology Officer. He built MIME360, the flagship product of Mallers Inc, which was a platform for the management and distribution of digital content to various legal online streaming sites and apps. Prior to Mallers Inc, Rahul was with the Data Center Business Unit at Cisco Systems. At Cisco Systems, he was part of the team that developed the market changing MDS 9000 family of SAN switches. He was leading a team working on advanced storage solutions for the SAN. He architected and executed the development of solutions such as SAN Based Data Migration and Extended SCSI Copy for the SAN. Rahul came into Cisco through the acquisition of Andiamo Systems, a Storage Area Network (SAN) switching and SAN based storage services company. He is named on multiple Storage Virtualization related patents and has been actively involved in storage technologies and standards such as SCSI, Fibre Channel, iSCSI and RAID.
Rahul holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Purdue University, USA and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Bombay (Mumbai) University, India (Gold Medallist).
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In this episode, co-founder of pinBox solutions Gautam Bhardwaj talks with host Sanjay Jain about their use of technology to expand digital micro-pension inclusion across numerous nations for an assured affluent old age.
About the Guest:
Gautam is co-founder of pinBox - a global pensionTech and expert advisory firm committed exclusively to expanding digital micro-pension coverage to self-employed women and youth across Asia and Africa. Over the last 25 years, Gautam has worked with several governments, regulators and financial inclusion stakeholders to design and build inclusive mechanisms for comprehensive pension and social security inclusion. He was one of the architects of India's National Pension System.
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About the Episode:
Join Amit Ranjan, in this episode with Sanjay Jain, as he shares the journey of DigiLocker. With over 200 types of documents, over 5 Billion documents, it is making the lives of Indians better by allowing them easier ways to manage various critical documents, and improving trust. Truly a #BuildForBharat initiative!
About the Guest:
Amit Ranjan is Cofounder of SlideShare, the world's largest professional content sharing community. SlideShare was acquired by LinkedIn in 2012.
After exiting SlideShare, Amit joined the Digital India Program run by the National eGovernance Division, Ministry of Electronics & IT, Government of India. He was the Architect for the DigiLocker Project. A key initiative under Digital India, this project is part of IndiaStack and aims to build a nationwide ecosystem for paperless governance by digitizing citizen data records & enabling their digital usage. Amit is deeply involved in the Indian startup community as an advisor, mentor, investor and speaker. Prior to his entrepreneurial venture, Amit had a career in product marketing, sales and consumer research, having worked for PepsiCo, Asian Paints & Godrej. He holds an MBA from FMS, Delhi University & a Mechanical Engineering degree from NIT Jaipur.
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About the Episode:
Manish Singh, the Chief Product Officer at BlackBuck, discusses how their product is helping truckers increase their business, gain trust, and adopt technology in this episode. The Build for Bharat Podcast's host Sanjay Jain engages the guest in conversation and explains how they transformed the logistics and transportation ecosystems.
About the Guest:
Manish has been with BlackBuck for the last three years. He has 15 years of experience in Consumer internet products, Mobile Search & Advertising Products, User Experience and Product Management, Product Strategy for Marketing & Monetization. Prior to BlackBuck, He has been associated with organizations such as Ola and HolidayIQ. Manish is B.Tech graduate from IIT Kanpur.
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About the Episode:
In this episode, Harshvardhan Lunia, co-founder and CEO of Lendingkart, discusses the three issues that the lending industry needs to address in the coming ten years: cloud and digital native, personalization from standardisation, and customer experience. Join him and the host Sanjay Jain on the 24th episode of the Build for Bharat Podcast as they discuss how digital returns in cost savings and increased customer reach as a result of the shift from standardisation to personalization.
About the Guest:
As the Co-founder and CEO of Lendingkart, Harshvardhan Lunia plays an imperative role in building and scaling a world-class team that designs innovative credit solutions and delivers growth for MSMEs. An exemplary leader and a pioneer at heart, Harshvardhan has always been driven by the passion of small business owners who despite of being creditworthy were not served by existing lenders. With a vision to implement technology and enable easy MSME financing, Harshvardhan founded Lendingkart in 2014 along with Mukul Sachan. Harshvardhan possesses an in-depth understanding of the evolving MSME ecosystems and has over 15+ years of experience. Harshvardhan's expertise includes managing the overall business leadership and growth conversations, developing the company's macroeconomics, focusing on new business and growth opportunities, in addition to contributing to growth projections and trends. Prior to Lendingkart, Harshvardhan has served as the founder & director at Domestic Finance & Investment Private Limited, where he specialized in arranging alternative modes of financing for SME's. As the relationship manager at ICICI Bank bank earlier to that, Hashvardhan’s primary role involved interacting with clients, understanding their requirements & structuring the deals, in addition to interacting with risk, credit, legal, operations, and executions. Harshvardhan has also worked with The Standard Chartered Bank and HDFC Bank in varying capacities. Harshvardhan's goal encompasses implementing Big data credit scoring with analytics and artificial intelligence. He is a Chartered Accountant and pursued his Post Graduation from ISB (Indian School of Business, Hyderabad).
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In the 23rd episode of the Build for Bharat Podcast, Dilip Modi, Founder of Spice money joins Sanjay Jain to talk about how they are using nano-preneurs to build trust for enabling financial services for Bharat.
About the Guest:
One of India’s most successful young entrepreneurs and amongst its foremost digital experts, Dilip Kumar Modi is the Founder of Spice Money. Dilip is a second generation entrepreneur who has pioneered several new innovations and built a strong portfolio of businesses within the Indian mobility and technology space during his stellar career spanning over two decades. Today, he is furthering the cause for financial inclusion and empowerment of rural India with Spice Money. Spice Money is progressing, at a great pace, with a mission to revolutionise the way Bharat banks by bridging the gap between the served and the under-served by providing digital and financial services to customers at their doorstep through its million strong Adhikari (nanopreneur) network. Dilip holds a First Class Bachelor of Science Degree in Management Technology from Brunel University, London, UK. He has done his Master’s in Business Administration from the Management School at the Imperial College, London, with a specialisation in Finance.
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About the Episode:
At Perfios, V. Govindarajan bridged the gap between data and insight by developing proprietary data aggregation and analysis tools. Join him with host Sanjay Jain on the 22nd episode of the Build for Bharat Podcast where he shares the role of standardisation in formal financial services.
About the Guest:
V.R. Govindarajan, or Govi as he is fondly known, is a successful serial entrepreneur with over 35 years of experience in the IT industry in India and the US.
With an MS in Computer Science from Massachusetts University and B.E. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Govi is quite the tech enthusiast. He is an avid participant in the Database technology and AI communities and participates in various Indian and international domain conferences.
Before co-founding Perfios Software, Govi was a co-founder, CTO, and member of the Board at Aztecsoft, a pioneer in the Offshore Product Development space. Aztecsoft went on to become a listed company, that was acquired by Mindtree in 2008.
Soon after exiting Mindtree, Govi was struck by how hard it was to consolidate and manage one’s finances. True to his entrepreneurial and tech roots, he co-founded Perfios in 2008 to solve this problem. Initially launched as a PFM App, Perfios successfully pivoted to a B2B analytics platform to help lenders automate credit decisioning.
Perfios is a pioneer in real-time credit decisioning, helping over 270+ banks, NBFCs, and fintechs in digitizing lending, cutting process times from hours to minutes. Perfios uses advanced ML tools to understand over 2,000 types of (un-)structured data, and processes over 5 million bank statements a month, apart from various other financial data.
Perfios today has products and platforms to automate the entire customer journey from discovery, application, KYC, data sharing, decisioning, disbursements, and credit monitoring. Perfios today is a one-stop solution for any lender looking to delight its customers with the best possible digital experience. Since 2018, Perfios has expanded geographically to serve 40 customers in 13 countries, excluding India. Perfios aspires to grow its revenues 10X between now and 2025, backed by deep domain expertise, product quality, execution excellence, and solid support from marquee investors such as Bessemer Venture Partners and Warburg Pincus.
Apart from work, Govi is a Sanskrit scholar, music lover, consummate cook, and mentor to entrepreneurs seeking to build a successful business patiently yet aggressively over the long term.
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About the Episode:
Buyhive is in the business of setting up a network of experts that can help small businesses in India be part of global of supply chains. Join their founder, Minesh on this episode of the Build for Bharat Podcast with Sanjay Jain as he shares his journey on what it takes to build for the small and medium enterprises of Bharat.
About the Guest:
Minesh is the Cofounder of BuyHive, a B2B tech-enabled sourcing platform that is reinventing traditional sourcing for the digital age. He is a notable global trade expert with over 20 years’ experience leading multinational organizations in Intraprenuership, corporate transformation, business development, and strategic planning. Minesh founded BuyHive in 2019 to address the growing demand for more efficient ways to source quality products from buyers worldwide. The BuyHive platform integrates the advantages of e-commerce with specialised, tailored sourcing services, through its vast network of sourcing experts spread throughout Asia. Minesh has over two decades of global sourcing, sales and business development experience. Prior to founding BuyHive, he worked as Director of International Business at Global Sources. Throughout his career, he has worked in executive positions for several globally renowned companies worldwide, including Intertek, Pico, and Tata Infomedia. During his career he has lived and worked in New York, London, Shanghai, Taipei, Mumbai, and Hong Kong. He has also worked with global trade show organisers across all five continents. Minesh also has extensive experience in managing buyer-supplier relationships and has close connections with some of the largest operators in the global supply chain domain, including manufacturers, compliance agencies, and logistics providers. He holds a Masters in International Management, Brand Management and International Marketing from the prestigious Thunderbird School of Global Management.
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Sanket Nayak is the founder of Digio and has been helping businesses go paperless. In the episode of the Build For Bharat Podcast, he joins Sanjay Jain to share the various nuances that need to be balanced where regulation, compliance and process management are involved. Listen to this episode to hear the unique challenges of the Bharat ecosystem in this aspect
About the Guest:
Sanket is the Co-Founder of DIGIO, a company he started with Abhinav in 2016. DIGIO helps businesses go paperless with their processes. Prior to starting DIGIO, Sanket was part of the Product team at Twitter working on growth products for emerging markets. He was also an early team member of ZipDial and served as Director- Platform Operations, which was acquired by Twitter. Prior to ZipDial, Sanket was an early member at CRIF HighMark and Earth2Orbit. He has played roles in Product Management, Operations, Sales & Business development. Sanket holds Masters in Space Studies and Masters Astronautical Engineering from International Space University (ISU), Strasbourg, France and University of Southern California (USC), L.A.
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While there is a seemingly large opportunity for startups to serve the underserved and unserved users of Bharat, we do not see enough innovative entrepreneurs flocking to this space. Join Priyanka Chopra, COO at CIIE.CO as she joins a chat where she shares how the right support systems and risk capital can enable entrepreneurs to become agents of change.
About the Guest:
Priyanka Chopra is the Chief Operating Officer and Managing Partner, Seed Investing at CIIE.CO and a Venture Partner at Bharat Innovation Fund. She has previously worked in the high-tech industry with Sun Microsystems and IBM in a variety of design, engineering and strategy roles and later in the social impact space with Piramal Sarvajal, seeking to provide access to clean, drinking water to India’s underserved using technology and community engagement. Ms. Agarwal Chopra completed her MBA from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and has a M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
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About the Episode:
Making a missed call – dialing a number and disconnecting it before the call is picked up - is a unique Indian way of interaction. Join Sanjay Swamy on this episode with host Sanjay Jain as they talk about using the missed call mechanism for providing personalized services for Bharat.
About the Guest:
Sanjay is well known for his founding role at ZipDial (now acquired by Twitter) and his role at mChek, the path breaking startup in secure payments, Sanjay has trodden the path of an entrepreneur all through his career. After completing his bachelor's degree in engineering, Sanjay headed to Paris where he earned his Master's degree.
After a stint at Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, Sanjay embarked on a journey to build world class teams and products that took him through startups like Ketera and Portal Software, mChek, Zipdial & Ezetap which he co‐founded in 2010.
An active member of the community, Sanjay is a Rotarian and a charter member of TiE, a volunteer at iSPIRT, and organizes the Fintech Panel at the Nasscom Product Conclave. He also played a prominent role on the UIDAI project under the leadership of Nandan Nilekani. He is a frequent speaker and evangelist in the entrepreneurship and payments circuits in the country. Sanjay loves to blog ‐ anything you say that is half‐way intelligent will turn into a subject for his blog.
Sanjay is currently a Managing Partner at Prime Venture Partners, an early-stage VC firm based out of Bangalore. Prime recently announced its fourth fund of US$120 million. It will continue to focus on being the first institutional investor, maintaining its high-conviction and deep-support investing model in early-stage technology startups. In addition to existing focus areas of Fintech, EdTech, HealthTech, Consumer Internet and Global SaaS, the firm expects to expand into new areas, notably Decentralised Finance (DeFi)/Crypto, Electric Vehicle and Gaming infrastructure platforms.
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Chittu Nagarajan was part of Ebay where she was instrumental in setting up online dispute resolution allowing ebay to scale the way it did. Join her and Sanjay Jain on this episode of the Build for Bharat podcast where they discuss how streamlining online dispute resolution in a complex ecosystem can help startups of Bharat, build for scale.
About the Guest:
Chittu Nagarajan is a pioneer and thought leader in the field of ODR for over 20 years. She is also a serial ODR Entrepreneur – Current Co-Founder ODR.com; Founder CREK ODR, Past - Co-Founder MODRIA; Head eBay and PayPal Community Courts; Founder ODRIndia and ODRWorld. Her expertise in the ODR field includes research, teaching, policy making, auditing, analysis, systems design and implementation. She is a Fellow of the National Center for Technology and Dispute Resolution (NCTDR) at UMass- Amherst; a Founding Board member and immediate past President of the International Council for Online Dispute Resolution (ICODR) and an Expert Speaker at the UN Women Access to Justice Initiative.
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eGov exists to improve the ease of living that Indian citizens experience, across towns and cities in the areas of health, sanitation and public financial management. Join Viraj Tyagi on this episode with Sanjay Jain as he shares how they are building systems for Bharat and going from closed source platforms to creating open platforms.
About the Guest:
Viraj Tyagi is the CEO of eGov Foundation. He is passionate about the impact of a ‘jugalbandi’ of public digital platforms, policies and ecosystem in solving complex societal problems at scale and speed. Viraj believes that digital transformation is not as much about ‘digitising & automation’ as it is about humans, improving quality of life, removing barriers and creating trust between various actors. Prior to joining the impact sector, Viraj was an entrepreneur and corporate leader with wide-ranging experience in building large businesses in Europe and India. A serial entrepreneur, mentor, and active investor, he was the CEO and co-founder of NettPositive, one of the first Big Data and Analytics companies in India. He is also a co-founder of the fintech start-up, Finnable. He is on the board of several start-ups and companies. Viraj is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIM-B) and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT – BHU).
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Have you ever wondered about health data that's sitting across a multitude of providers? Can it be used to empower end users for own better care whether it is with other doctors or with insurers? What would it be like if AI systems were able to give a second opinion? Join Kiran with Sanjay on this episode of the Build for Bharat podcast as they chat about developing the Ayushman Bharat Digital Health Ecosystem.
About the Guest:
Kiran Anandampillai is currently the Advisor -Technology at the National Health Authority (NHA). He supports NHA to create digital public goods under India’s two large digital health initiatives - The Ayushman Bharath Digital Mission (ABDM) and Ayushman Bharath (PMJAY).
Kiran is a telecom engineer by training and was a founding member of OnMobile, where he helped build it to become a public company. He was a volunteer with UIDAI for the Aadhaar program and is currently a volunteer with the iSPIRT foundation where he works on the Health Stack. He dedicates his time to driving impact in healthcare. He is the founder and CEO of iDrishti, which delivers high quality eyecare from a district capital to the village level. iDrishti currently manages 12 eye hospitals across Karnataka, India.
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In India, language changes over distances as small as 50 to 100 kilometers. One of the biggest challenges when it comes to builders making for India, is to build in Indian languages.
On this episode, join Jai Nanavati who is driving the Bharat economy with Voice AI for enterprises as he shares with Sanjay, a behind the scenes look at what goes to enabling last mile access of digital services in Bharat.
About the Guest:
Jai Nanavati is CTO @ Navana AI where that is enabling e-commerce players to be able to better serve the Indian demographic. They do so by voice enabling whatsapp business numbers such that users can engage with brands in local language using voice and text. At Navana, Jai is responsible for technology, HR and strategy.
About the Episode:
BHIM UPI is one of the greatest Payment success stories in the world today. However, at its launch, it was met with reservation that often accompanies innovation. Would UPI matter if banks still had IMPS? On this episode of the Build for Bharat podcast join Nikhil Kumar with Sanjay as they discuss why BHIM was essential to the success of UPI.
About the Guest:
Nikhil is an engineer by education, and has worked at the likes of Intuit, Tally Solutions and Exotel before he went on to become a part of the prestigious IndiaStack community at iSPIRT. He was instrumental in bringing the BHIM App into reality, while he worked closely with the Aadhaar and the UPI teams under Nandan Nilekani's leadership. Today, he is the Cofounder of Setu, a financial infrastructure company that is building revolutionary API engines and products on top of the existing public digital infrastructure such as Aadhaar, UPI among others.
About the Episode:
At Gupshup, Beerud Sheth has been enabling communications to drive business. For most of us, conversations are intuitive and something we learn as children. Tune into this episode with Beerud and Sanjay to discover how Bharat can move from the downloadable app to the 'conversational experience' era.
About the Guest:
Beerud Sheth is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the leading conversational engagement platform. Gupshup helps businesses engage their customers better through personalized conversational experiences. The company operates in 40+ countries, has over 45k customers and delivers 9 billion messages every month. Sheth previously co-founded Elance (now Upwork; NASDAQ: UPWK), which pioneered online freelancing. Its online platform enables businesses to tap into a network of millions of freelancers worldwide, enabling over $3.5 billion in gross transaction value. He has a Masters in Computer Science from MIT and a Bachelors in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Silver Medal.
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While we feel smartphones are the norm, most of Bharat still heavily relies on feature phones. Taron Mohan has been bridging this gap by digitising and bringing inclusion through innovation. Listen to him on this episode with Sanjay Jain.
About the Guest:
Taron Mohan is an Entrepreneur, Technologist, adventurer and mentor. A globetrotter, he has multi-faceted experience across manufacturing, mobiles, payments, telecom networks, transit and digital inclusion. At IIT, he built a conversion kit for shuttle power looms into air-jet looms, the winding drum from Leesona Corp that led to enhanced productivity by 230% with 50% additional Capex.
Presently at NextGen Telesolutions Pvt. Ltd., he explores multiple avenues for new products : • Developed the full-service secure banking/wallet / payment platform using the SIM overlay secure element solution. Secure Digital / Cashless banking on mobiles targeted at the developing world. • Extended this to using a smart microSD card with NFC capability • Including contactless / TapNPay payments for transit into mainstream payments – cards / banking / wallets / money transfers and more. • Delivered the country’s most advanced entertainment park ticketing solution – The Statue of Unity, one of the top100 parks, drawing over 0.5 million visitors a month. • Building India’s first “Designed and Made in India” the transit Automatic Fare Collection System (AFCS) integrating QR code / closed and open-loop card based fare systems. Globally one of the first as an integrated solution. Brings Metro / BRT / Bus ticketing and Toll collection as a single integrated solution. • Built another innovative merchant payment terminal – dynamic QR codes, “designed and made in India for the world” • Retail and ATM adaptations for contactless cards including enabling standard COTS android NFC devices to accept EMV contactless cards. He is disrupting and re-defining mobile banking and payments across the globe with a core focus on adding security and encryption capabilities to mobile devices enabling “secure transactions” on any device.
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Less than 30% of farmers today have access to formal credit and while government programs exist, they have not been able to resolve the credit issues faced by farmers.
In this episode, Sanjay Mansabdar talks to Sanjay Jain about how technology is reimagining a solution to this challenge.
About the Guest:
Dr. Sanjay Mansabdar is the Founder of Dvara E-Registry. In his role as the CEO and CTO of Dvara E-Registry, he is responsible for bringing to reality the vision of financial inclusion, agricultural and business productivity services for smallholder farmers and Farmer Producer Organisations, along with other stakeholders in the agri value chain. Sanjay has close to 30 years of experience across Financial Markets, Venture Capital and Banking. He has held leadership roles in various organisations across the globe, including JP Morgan, Bank of America, Azura Capital Advisors, National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange Limited (NCDEX), Dubai Gold and Commodities Exchange, among others. He has led scalable businesses with an interdisciplinary approach to business, finance and technology. As a part of his PhD, he has embarked on extensive research that brings together his interests, passion and expertise. Sanjay has published multiple papers studying the role of data and technology in increasing financial and agricultural productivity. Sanjay has led Dvara E-Registry to create pathbreaking solutions that seamlessly integrate technology, agriculture and credit that ultimately benefit the most vulnerable demographic of India – the smallholder farmer. Sanjay holds a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay and a PGDBM from XLRI, Jamshedpur. He has a PhD in Economics and Finance from BITS Pilani.
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Governments across the world struggle at having an efficient mechanism for delivering social protection to the needy. In this episode of the Build for Bharat Podcast, join Amit Shukla as he chats with Sanjay Jain about how he is approaching one of the most difficult problems for Bharat - solving for how the government can efficiently distribute subsidies and benefits.
About the Guest:
Amit Shukla’s passion is to make social protection family centric and progressive. He founded GovTech Startup EasyGov in 2015 for effective and efficient utilization of Rs18 Lacs crore social protection budget in India. EasyGov’s white-labelled platform is adopted by Government of Karnataka, Bihar, Haryana, Assam, Tripura, MyGov and MyJio. Amit is Champions of Change for Digital India recognised by NITI Aayog. EasyGov got acquired by Jio Platform in 4th year of formation. Amit is board of several foundations and companies. Before starting EasyGov, Amit has worked as an advisor to state & central Govt. in 15+ projects in area of national security and human services in India, Australia, Middle East, USA and Japan. His 10+ years corporate experience spans through Accenture Strategy, KPMG Advisory & Wipro Consulting.
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Many things today, be it the Arogya Setu app or the entire ONDC platform that was recently launched, is open source. How many of us have thought where does this come from?
Join Rahul Kulkarni with Sanjay Jain on this episode to understand the importance of building capacity with open source and the impact this has on technology, talent and governance for Bharat.
About the Guest:
Rahul Kulkarni is the Chief Technologist at Samagra, a mission-driven governance consulting firm. At Samagra, Rahul leads digital transformations across state governments in India using a unique model of leveraging open source software and by building capacity and capability of internal teams within the government. Rahul has been instrumental to the success of projects such as Antyodaya Saral for G2C service delivery in Haryana, Kalia for direct income transfer and ADAPT for decision support impacting 6.5 million farmers in Odisha, foundational literacy and numeracy technology building blocks for 12 million primary children in Uttar Pradesh, eSamvaad for parent teacher connect and phygital learning in Himachal Pradesh, amongst others. Rahul is also co-founder and Partner at DoNew, a social enterprise creating the pedagogy and practice of mentorship to help individuals and teams realize their true potential. At DoNew, Rahul and another ex-Googler Vihari, have successfully applied mentorship based learning and performance models in organizations of various sizes and in different domains -- from large organizations to startups to colleges and K12 schools, as well as domains across fin-tech, travel-tech, prop-tech, telco, retail-tech and education.
Rahul previously served as Chief Product Officer at Sokrati, an ad technology startup that was eventually acquired by Dentsu-Japan. Before entering the startup world, Rahul spent six years at Google - starting out as Google’s first product manager in India in 2006 and helping build several of Google’s key products and businesses - Google Finance, Orkut, OpenSocial and Google Apps platforms, Google Cloud Platform, Google India Maps amongst others. Prior to Google, Rahul was the Product Manager for LabVIEW at National Instruments Corp in Austin, TX where for five years he led cutting edge product development, with customers such as NASA and CERN. Rahul holds 9 patents, is a TEDx speaker, serves on various expert technical committees, has a Masters in Engineering from Georgia Tech in Atlanta and Bachelors in Engineering from VJTI Mumbai.
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About the Episode:
For most of us, the first memory of using a mobile device was using a basic feature phone. While now we flaunt smartphones, most of Bharat still uses a basic feature phone and is dependent on it . At GupShup, Beerud started with the premise, that a basic device can be used to get more done through software either on the device or the server. You could call it making the feature phones smarter. Listen to this episode with him and Sanjay to discover more.
About the Guest:
Beerud Sheth is the co-founder and CEO of Gupshup, the leading conversational engagement platform. Gupshup helps businesses engage their customers better through personalized conversational experiences. The company operates in 40+ countries, has over 45k customers and delivers 9 billion messages every month. Sheth previously co-founded Elance (now Upwork; NASDAQ: UPWK), which pioneered online freelancing. Its online platform enables businesses to tap into a network of millions of freelancers worldwide, enabling over $3.5 billion in gross transaction value. He has a Masters in Computer Science from MIT and a Bachelors in Computer Science from IIT Bombay, where he was awarded the Silver Medal.
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Google Maps is one of the most popular applications in the world. However, at launch it only had maps data for the developed world till the launch of Google Mapmaker, which allowed users to create maps for 180 countries, including India and China. Even now, users contribute over 20M pieces of of information every day to keep maps up to date.
The idea of letting users build maps might seem daunting, even today. Tune in to hear Lalitesh and Sanjay discuss the road less navigated.
About the Guest:
Lalitesh is a pioneer in crowdsourcing and platforms for the underserved. His creation, Google Map Maker, tripled the world's digital maps corpus, mapping 4 billion people in 187 countries. The UN and aid agencies have used these user generated maps in hundreds of disasters to assist and rescue millions. Lalitesh co-founded Google's first international engineering center, retired as Google’s Head of India products having invented, led products including Crowdsourced YouTube Subtitles, Crowdsourced translation corpus, Indic handwriting & Google Transliteration. He is now focused on India’s nation building as founder Indihood, Swaja Labs, co-founder Avanti Finance. As advisor MEITY, NHA, DST, NSE SCOT, MoF, IIT-Bombay; Lalitesh has architected Aarogya Setu, Digital India’s Open API and AP Fiber Grid. Lalitesh has spoken at TED, the Brookings institute and the Whitehouse on how the internet will revolutionize the lives of the next 5 Billion. Prior to Google, Lalitesh served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon where he founded the Lunar Rover Initiative and later founded a robotics startup which became Google’s first acquisition in 2002. Lalitesh received his PhD and MS from CMU in Robotics and Computer Science; MS from Design Division, Stanford; MS in Aerospace, Iowa State and his B-Tech from IIT-Bombay.
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At NowFloats, Ronak's goal was to help small businesses create an internet presence, even though they were not digital natives. Join him and Sanjay on this episode of the Build for Bharat podcast as they discuss how he helped their users step out of their comfort zone. Ronak Samantray - CoFounder NowFloats
A coder since Class V, Ronak Kumar Samantray turned his interest into a career when he graduated with a Bachelor of Technology degree in Computer Science from the College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar, India.
After a three-year stint at Microsoft, he was driven to create a consumer app. It led him to become the co-founder of NowFloats, a company that aims to make the internet relevant for millions of India’s small and medium businesses. Under his leadership, NowFloats grew from an idea to a flourishing startup that provides multiple solutions to help businesses across the country.
His drive and entrepreneurial mindset bagged him a place in the “Forbes 30 Under 30 (Asia)” list for Enterprise Technology, receive an INK fellowship, apart from an eFounders Fellowship from Alibaba Business School (in association United Nations Conference on Trade and Development or UNCTAD).
About the Episode:
Propelling customers towards meeting their real life-goals by providing them intuitive & tailored financial solutions is no mean feat. Join Natasha and Sanjay as they discuss distribution of financial products for Bharat and how to manage in low resource conditions.
About the Guest:
As the CTO and Co-founder of Kaleidofin, Natasha Jethanandani is focused on making financial services inclusive, especially for the unbanked. Having been VP of Engineering at BankBazaar, building tech for financial services wasn’t new for Natasha. After gaining her Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science and Economics from Stanford University, Natasha worked with Fortune 100 companies like Microsoft and Google in the US leading engineering teams. She relocated to India and continued to pursue her dream of building strong tech to make an impact. As CTO, Natasha leads the Technology, Data Science and Product Management teams at Kaleidofin. She brings synergy to these roles. As a tech-focused and data-oriented firm her contribution to constantly refining our algorithms and making our platform accessible to every customer across India, especially those who are underserved today.
About the episode:
Building a system that works at the scale needs the right approach, technology and team. UPI is one of the biggest success stories of Bharat, processing more than a billion API calls everyday. Join Sateesh and Sanjay on this episode as they discuss scale and reliability in this episode of the Build for Bharat Podcast.
About the guest:
Mr. Sateesh Palagiri is VP & Head Information Technology since July 2015. He is an experienced Technology professional who has been instrumental in delivering Turnkey Technology projects at NPCI backed with hands-on experience in Switching technology and Applications delivery and management. Sateesh has been associated with NPCI since the formation of the company and has handled multifarious profiles with specific reference to NFS Switching Technology, RuPay and the most recent deliveries for UPI. He brings with him a relevant experience of over 15 years in Banking Technologies, both in the Domestic and International markets. In his last assignment before NPCI, he was associated with Euronet Operations Center-Budapest. He holds B.E (Electrical & Electronics) degree from Kuvempu University.
About the Episode:
Indians speak many languages but websites and apps are often limited to using English. In this episode, Vivek and Sanjay discuss the role of AI and its readiness in bridging the gap so that Bharat can use Technology in local languages.
About the Guest:
Dr. Vivek Raghavan is an out-of-the-box problem solver, former serial entrepreneur and angel investor.
Vivek has an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a B. Tech. from IIT Delhi.
Vivek is the Chief Product Manager and Biometric Architect at the Unique Identification Authority of India. He has been responsible for the design, implementation and scale out of the technology platform for Aadhaar, the world’s largest identity program mostly as a volunteer.
He joined the Aadhaar project just when the first Aadhaar was issued, and was there when the billionth Aadhaar was generated. In the past 3 years, Vivek has been exploring the use of AI in many public and governance domains.
He is driving many AI initiatives at Aadhaar in the areas of biometrics and document validation. Vivek has been responsible for guiding the development of ML models at GSTN and NPCI.
As Chief AI Evangelist at the EkStep foundation, Vivek has been advising the National Language Translation Mission to develop open datasets and open models for language AI technologies for Indian languages.
Vivek serves as a member of the AI committee of the Supreme Court of India. Vivek has been a long term volunteer with the iSPIRT foundation where he is contributor to DEPA.
Vivek had also served as an volunteer CTO for Team Indus, India's entry to the Google Lunar XPrize, which aimed to land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon.
Vivek spent 20 years in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), successfully founding, running and selling two EDA companies and being responsible for the design and development of multiple market leading EDA products.
He has held senior management positions at Magma Design Automation, Synopsys and Avant! Corporation. Vivek has an eclectic portfolio of angel investments, including Team Indus, Gear Design Automation, eZeTap, ZipDial, HealthifyMe, and Vayavya Labs among others.
About the Episode:
In the first episode of Build for Bharat, Pramod and Sanjay dive into simplifying the user experience for Aadhaar. With 1 million enrollments coming in a day, there was very little room for error and yet this is what the team dealt with. Listen to this episode to discover, how builders think about design, so that the system can adapt to change and scale.
About the Guest:
Dr. Pramod Varma is the CTO of EkStep Foundation, a not-for-profit creating learner centric, open source, digital public goods under Project Sunbird (sunbird.org). These digital building blocks are used to provide learning opportunities to 200 million children in India and also in other learning, skilling, and capacity building efforts in India and other countries.
In addition, he continues to be the Chief Architect of Aadhaar, India's digital identity program that has successfully covered more than 1.2 billion people in a short span of 7 years. He also helped architect various India Stack layers such as eSign, Digital Locker, and Unified Payment Interface (UPI), and Data Empowerment and Protection Architecture (DEPA), all of which are now working at population scale in India. He is also the co-founder of Beckn Foundation, the genesis author and angel donor of the open source beckn protocol (becknprotocol.io) for creation of decentralized open discovery, fulfillment, and commerce networks. He is an advisor to Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), National Payment Corporation (NPCI), Goods and Services Tax Network (GSTN), National Health Authority (NHA), Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), Turing Institute Identity Initiative in the UK, and helps with many digital public infrastructure initiatives in India and across the globe.
Pramod holds a Master’s and Ph.D. degree in Computer Science along with a second Master’s in Applied Mathematics. His interests include Internet scale distributed architectures and intelligent systems. He is passionate about technology, science, society, and teaching
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In this episode, we hear from our host, Sanjay Jain, on how the Build For Bharat Podcast will bring together Builders actively creating products, creating infrastructure, and developing markets for the digital products that hold the promise of a more inclusive Bharat.