1. Mr VK Madhavan
Chief Executive – WaterAid India
Following a Master’s in International Politics from Jawaharlal Nehru University in 1991, Madhavan commenced working with the Urmul Rural Health Research and Development Trust in Bikaner district of Rajasthan where he worked in various capacities till 1998. Subsequently, Madhavan worked with Action Aid and The Hunger Project for four years. For eight years commencing in 2004, Madhavan was the Executive Director of Central Himalayan Rural Action Group (Chirag) in Nainital District of Uttarakhand. For three years from 2013 to 2016, Madhavan was Managing Director of Skills Education Private Limited, a company that provides youth with access to information, skills and opportunities leading to employment. In over two decades as a development professional, Madhavan has worked on an integrated approach to rural development – community health, primary education, natural resource management, on and off-farm livelihoods and investing in young people. Madhavan has been Chief Executive of WaterAid India since June 2016.
2. Anuj Sharma
CEO – Piramal Water Pvt Ltd.
Anuj Sharma is a social entrepreneur and development practitioner. Over the past 16 years, he has been engaged in the design and scaling up of low-cost, high-impact sustainable solutions for underserved communities across India. Since 2009, he has been instrumental in spearheading the evolution and implementation of decentralised business models for providing drinking water to villages, schools, slums and public places.
Before joining Piramal Sarvajal, he was a national committee member at Pratham, an education non-profit. There, he led the Rajasthan chapter and the Read Rajasthan campaign, which reached out to over 1.7m students across 40,000 government schools. As part of several government and public–private partnership committees, he has contributed significantly to the creation and proliferation of effective solutions for the education and water industries.
Mr Sharma has held multiple sessions on social entrepreneurship and development management at leading Indian management institutes, including the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, Institute Rural Management Anand and the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India. Having been a social entrepreneurship fellow at Santa Clara University’s Global Social Business Incubator, he has also been recognised as one of India’s most talented rural marketing professionals by CMO Asia, in 2014 and 2015.
He holds a master’s degree in business administration from the Institute of Rural Management Anand, where he was a Tata-Amul scholar, and a bachelor’s degree in textile technology engineering from MLV Textile & Engineering College in Bhilwara, Rajasthan.
About Piramal Sarvajal
Piramal Sarvajal, seeded by the Piramal Foundation in 2008, is a mission driven social enterprise, which designs and deploys innovative solutions for creating affordable access to safe drinking water in underserved areas. Sarvajal is at the forefront of developing technologies and business practices in the safe drinking water sector that are designed to make a purely market-based model sustainable in both rural and urban deployment conditions. Currently, we are reaching out to about 7,26,000+ beneficiaries daily, through 1680+ touch-points across 20 states in India.