Enactus

Enactus SSCBS: Winners of Enactus Nationals 2016

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If you’re a student in college, it’s quite apparent to hear the word ‘Enactus’ time and again, and be drawn towards it once you gather knowledge of their far-reaching projects. Enactus is essentially an international non-profit organization that brings together teams of university students with entrepreneurs and admirable educators to make a meaningful difference in their communities while enhancing their business skills to become great leaders of today and tomorrow.

In the Enactus India National Championship, students from all over the country are provided a forum to showcase the results of their extensive business ventures and community outreach projects through rounds of live, presentation based competition. Having previously won the Enactus National Championship twice, once in 2011 and the other in 2014, Enactus Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies (SSCBS) recently scored a hat-trick by emerging victorious, again, at the Enactus Nationals 2016 held on 21st and 22nd July at Taj Lands End, Mumbai.

Established in January 2009, the team of Enactus SSCBS strives to create a significant change in the society by using the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and implementation of business models to empower all the disadvantaged members of the society and make them self sufficient individuals.

The first and the oldest initiative that Enactus SSCBS worked upon was Sanitary Solutions that aimed at improving the sanitary conditions of women in slums and villages across India. They also promoted the safe and effective use of sanitary napkins by making them easily accessible and extremely affordable to the women of rural areas and urban slums. This initiative was started from the slums of Delhi NCR and later, spread throughout the nation.

Their second outreach initiative was Project Akshar which began in 2011 and focused on setting up low cost environment-friendly notebook production units through collection of waste paper, recycling of the same and binding of this recycled paper into notebooks by our entrepreneurs, i.e. victims of drug abuse and human trafficking. This year, they expanded the paper collection to six cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Gurgaon, Noida and Vaishali. Further, they also came up with an innovative new variant of producing extremely low priced notebooks, especially for the underprivileged children.

Another project which the team effectively worked on was Grammodhar which aimed at creating an overall holistic development of Ghamroj, a village 30-40 kms from Gurgaon. To stimulate their economy, they encouraged and assisted people in setting up new business ventures such as Poultry farming, beauty parlors and tailoring works. Since it was difficult to penetrate a village, the team also used several trust building activities (such as health camps, etc) to have their bonafide intentions felt.

The two projects which the team presented at Enactus Nationals 2016 were Raahat and Udaan. Through Raahat, the team aims at eradicating open defecation by providing safe sanitation facilities and improving the existing infrastructure of community toilets. They began by undertaking the management of toilet complexes in Sultanpuri and adopted a user centric approach which included the system of family passes, sensitisation and health campaigns. As a result, the population who defecated in the open dropped from 95% to 3% after only six months of their project’s implementation. Udaan, on the other hand, aims to promote digital literacy through setting up of computer labs in villages and teaching the working knowledge of computers to all children by women entrepreneurs. Currently, the team has set up 12 computer centres in villages across Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and many more.

On being asked to unveil the secret of their team’s continual success, Harsh Garg, one of the team members of Enactus SSCBS said, “What really sets our team apart is our approach towards problem solving. One of our core beliefs has been that we can solve India’s most daunting social and economic issues if we empower individuals to take an action against it. This is manifest in all of our projects. We do not just empower our entrepreneurs in terms of their income but also in terms of their capability to impact people. This leads to a chain effect in which setting up even a single computer centre or a production unit ends up bringing about a change in several lives. Another thing which differentiates our team is the amount of passion and commitment exhibited by each and every member of the project. More than a team, we are a close knit family which possesses an unconditional attachment for our work at Enactus, without which we cannot survive even one normal conversation, let alone a day.”

Currently, the team is busy with their preparation of new ideas for their project’s presentation at the Enactus World Cup, where they will compete against the National Champion teams from 36 other countries in Toronto, Canada.
DU Beat wishes the entire team good luck for all their future endeavors!

Featured Image Credits: https://web.facebook.com/EnactusSscbs/?_rdr
Shagun Marwah
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[email protected] ; Leading by the quote “Every cloud has a silver lining”, Shagun tends to see the best of every situation and observes mostly what others leave unnoticed. One can find her either under an influence of the darkest corners of psychological thrillers or romanticism of John Green’s beautiful love stories. A writer with a weakness for coffee and petrichor, she blissfully escapes into the world of soulful music while travelling to new destinations or singing when nobody is around. Being a true Delhi-ite, her favorite street food, ranging from spicy aloo chaat to pani puri or sweet hot jalebis to chilled rabdi kulfi, is a love beyond measure.

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