Adani Announces to give Rs 5 Cr to Five Social Entrepreneurs

Winners to be chosen from India and the developing world Funding of Rs 5 Crore for Five Social Entrepreneurs

Bhubaneswar: The Adani Group will institute the Adani Prize for Social Enterprise – India’s biggest annual prize in the social sphere. This was announced by Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group, at the first-ever Green Talks, an Adani talk-series initiative to provide social entrepreneurs a platform to present their ideas and secure support for their work.

Beginning in 2022, the Adani Prize for Social Enterprise will be awarded to five outstanding social entrepreneurs for their impact in India and other parts of the developing world. The Adani Prize will provide a total of Rs 5 Crores in funding for the five chosen social enterprises. The winners will be chosen by an international panel of eminent personalities drawn from different fields of expertise, including science, business and governance.

“I am humbled by how social entrepreneurs devote themselves to the difficult, often underappreciated but essential work of helping those who are less privileged,” said Gautam Adani, Chairman of the Adani Group. “While we must invest heavily in enabling the transition to a greener, low carbon world, that transition must also include plans to enable the social upliftment of people. The green shoots of recovery for the planet can be truly green only if we create a climate of faith and optimism for even the world’s most socially deprived people. I am optimistic that the Adani Prize and the Green Talks series will lay the foundation for this process of discovering social entrepreneurs who are making major impacts and help to fund their best ideas.”

The Adani Group will invite other partners, including corporates, to join an initiative to create a collaborative fund for social enterprises that will help to expand the number of social upliftment projects that could be funded. As the first step, the Group will drive an open-source innovation platform as a unifying force for the best of ideas from social enterprises across the developing world.

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Five social enterprises, selected from over 25,000 social enterprises that participated in the 2021 TiE Sustainability Summit in October, were felicitated and honoured today at the Adani Green Talks in Ahmedabad. They included Arunachalam Muruganantham, better known as Pad-Man, healthcare innovator iKure, prosthetics technologist RoboBionics, automation developer GenRobotics and DharaviMarket founder Megha Gupta. The first-ever Green Talks was attended by several dignitaries including Ambassador Dr Claudio Anso Rena of Costa Rica and Deputy Ambassador Ms Rony Yedi Dia-Clein of Israel.