Start-up chosen for mentorship programme in Singapore

IIT-Madras-based education start-up, Involve, and two other start-ups — MANRAM and The Kisan Union — whose founders hail from Tamil Nadu, are among the firms selected for the Young Social Entrepreneurs (YSE) mentorship programme in Singapore this year. The YSE programme is hosted by the Singapore International Foundation.

The programme began with a four-day workshop in March. Start-ups were short-listed for an eight-month mentorship programme from April to October. In October, the teams will pitch their business plans to a panel of judges and six teams will be selected for seed funding of 20,000 Singapore dollars.

For the YSE programme 2018, 47 teams across 12 countries participated in the workshop.

Of these, 16 teams (including four from India) were selected to the next level.

Building student leaders

Involve trains senior school students in skills such as leadership, communication and confidence building. These students, in turn, impart these skills to their juniors.

The firm has worked with ASN Senior Secondary School, Delhi, Fathima CBSE School, Saidapet, and Kendriya Vidyalaya, IIT-Chennai Campus. Divanshu Kumar, founder and director of Involve, is pursuing an integrated dual degree programme at IIT-Madras.

MANRAM has three members — Vijaya Kumar, 23, from Chennai, who is a food processing engineer, Vishnu Harikumar, 26, an electronics communication engineer from Kerala and Ajmal Muhammad, 24, a computer science engineer, also from Kerala. They are currently studying at the the Institute of Rural Management Anand, Gujarat.

MANRAM is a millet processing cluster with its own farmer producer organisations, and produces a gluten-free, millet-based snack.

The Kisan Union is developing a solar-powered mobile smart kiosk, which provides information about government policies and health services to rural households.

(This correspondent was recently in Singapore on invitation from the Singapore International Foundation.)