1. Early life

2. Career
    Philips  PRADAN  VikaSoko  BASIX 

3. Policy Advisory and Board Roles

4. Positions and recognitions

5. Publications

6. References

Vijay Mahajan (born 1954) is an Indian social entrepreneur and the Founder and was the CEO till 30 September 2016 of the BASIX Social Enterprise Group^[1] which is engaged in livelihood promotion and supported the livelihoods of over three million low income households in over 20 states in India and six developing countries.

Vijay founded PRADAN an well-known Indian NGO in 1982, along with Deep Joshi who joined PRADAN in 1986. Vijay established VikaSoko Development Exchange in 1991 jointly with Thomas Fisher a Britisher and Geoffey Onegi-Obel, a Ugandan to work on social enterprises in India and East Africa. Vijay established the first three entities of what later became the BASIX Social Enteprise Group in 1996.

In 1998, jointly with Ela Bhatt Vijay co-founded Sa-Dhan, the association of community development financial institutions in 1999 with Ela Bhatt of SEWA. He was the founding President of MicroFinance Institutions Network (MFIN) of India in 2009.^[2] In 2010 he was elected Vice-Chair of the Global Agenda Council on Social Entrepreneurship of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Davos, along with Prof Greg Dees as Chair.^[3] In 2012, Vijay was elected as Chair of the Board of the World Bank's Consulative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), Washington DC.

Since the middle of 2018, Vijay is the CEO of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the Director of the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Contemporary Studies.^[4]

Early life

Vijay Mahajan was born in Pune, India in 1954. He attended the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1970 for a five-year bachelor's degree in technology, specialising in Electrical Engineering. He graduated from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad in 1981, earning a master's degree in business management.^[5]

Career

Philips

Vijay's first job was at the electronics multinational company Philips in a marketing position. He worked there for four years.

PRADAN

Vijay joined ASSEFA in Bihar in mid 1982. After turning around the initial project in Gaya, he set up new projects in Jamui and Deoghar districts and then many more in other northern states. Having demonstrated that professionals can make a positive difference, Vijay sought the help of ASSEFA's founder Mr Loganathan and executive coordinator, Mr TK Mathew, to work on the idea that Deep and he espoused – of professionals working at the developmental cutting edge. This led to the birth of PRADAN or "professional assistance for development action". Pradan in Hindi means "to give in exchange" as against dan which means "to give in charity".

In October 1983, PRADAN was established as a non-profit society and was funded by the Ford Foundation. Vijay became its first executive director. Continuing his work with ASSEFA, Vijay inducted a number of young professionals from the IITs, IIMs and top agricultural universities to work with ASSEFA as well as other NGOs such as MYRADA, Seva Mandir, Anand Niketan Ashram, Mahila Jagaran Samiti and Gram Vikas, Orissa. By 1986, PRADAN began its own direct work with rural poor communities, starting with the tribals of the Kesla block in Hoshangabad district of Madhya pradesh to the dalit carcass flayers of Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh to the tasar silk reares of Santhal Parganas of Bihar (now Jharkhand). Vijay topped up this flush of innovative projects by setting up three separate types of collaborative projects – for wasteland development with small NGOs in Purulia, West Bengal; for income-generation with ITC near its cigarette factories in Munger, Bihar and Saharanpur, UP; and with the local panchayats and district/block level government agencies in the Kishangarh Bas block of Alwar district in Rajasthan.

In keeping with the leadership norms then prevalent in his alma mater IIMA, he stepped down from the Executive Directorship after serving a five-year term. Deep Joshi, who had joined PRADAN in 1986, took over as the second Executive Director of PRADAN. Vijay then went for a year's fellowship to the Princeton University. On his return, he worked in PRADAN for a year and a half. He spent the initial few months with Mr Laxmi Chand Jain and Smt Ela Bhatt, who were both senior development activists then serving as Members of the Planning Commission of India. He also carried out a review of the first ten years of the program for rural management (PRM) offered by the Institute for Rural Management, Anand, (IRMA). The review was titled "In Search of Relevance" and was sponsored by the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation.

VikaSoko

In 1992, Vijay was joined by Thomas Fisher, whom he had met in Princeton and along with whom and a third colleague, Geoffrey Onegi-Obel, he had established a US non-profit agency called VikaSoko (a word synthesised from Vikas meaning development in Hindi and Soko meaning marketplace in Swahili). They then offered services as development consultants and researchers and also as trainers, but with a focus exclusively on the issue of livelihoods.

Their first assignment was for the Dalai Lama's Tibetan Government-in-Exile in Dharamsala, whom they worked with to produce the first Integrated Development Plan for the 120,000 Tibetan community in exile.^[6] Subsequently, they carried out a study of the Rural Non-Farm Sector in India,^[7] for the Indian National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC). Another study was of the SEWA Bank^[8] for the Ford Foundation and a third one of financial services for the rural poor and women,^[9] for the World Bank.

BASIX

In 1996, realising the need to attract mainstream financial resources, Vijay conceptualised BASIX,^[10][11][12] a new generation institution devoted to promoting a large number of livelihoods for the poor and women on a sustainable basis. BASIX^[13][14] established Bhartiya Samruddhi Finance Ltd (BSFL), which was among the first microfinance companies in the world to attract commercial debt and equity investments, both internationally and from within India. It also offers a range of services including savings and insurance, agricultural, livestock and non-farm enterprise development, and institutional development to rural producers and their groups.^[15][14] Some of his early colleagues at BASIX were BL Parthasarathy, Ashok Singha, Sankar Datta, MS Sriram, and D Sattaiah.

Policy Advisory and Board Roles

Vijay was a member of the Committee on Financial Sector Reforms, chaired by Raghuram Rajan and also of the C. Rangarajan Committee on Financial Inclusion. Vijay serves on the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, and the Micro Finance Development and Equity Fund. He is the Principal Advisor to the Government of Rajasthan on Livelihoods.

He served for several years on the Boards of various NGOs including Association for Sarva Seva Farms (ASSEFA), Gram Vikas, ARAVALI, Development Support Centre a. He also served on the boards of management institutions including the Indian Institute of Health Management Research, the Institute of Rural Management Anand and the Indian Institute of Forest Management.

Vijay has been an advisor to the Planning Commission, Government of India, the state governments of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Sikkim, and to RBI and NABARD. He was the Principal Advisor on Livelihoods to the Government of Rajasthan (2004-2010) and in that capacity helped conceptualise the Rajasthan Mission on Livelihoods,^[16] which later became the Rajasthan Skill and Livelihood Development Corporation^[17] in 2011.

Internationally, Vijay served on the Board of Oxfam America from 1995 to 1998 and from 2006–2012 on the Executive Committee(ExCom) of the World Bank's Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a global consortium of 33 bilateral, multilateral and private donor organisations on microfinance . In his last two years he was elected the Chair of the CGAP ExCom and in that capacity helped to move CGAP agenda from microfinance to financial inclusion. He was Vice-Chair, along with late Prof Greg Dees as Chair, of the Global Agenda Council on Social Entrepreneurship, World Economic Forum, Davos, 2009-2010.

Apart from founding and serving till Sept 2016 on the Boards of all the BASIX Group's social enterprises, Vijay served as an Independent Director on the Boards of several social enterprises such as Waste Ventures India Pvt Ltd, Swasth India Services Pvt Ltd, and financial inclusion enterprises, including as the promoter of the Krishna Bhima Samruddhi Local Area Bank Ltd (KBS Bank) and Sarvodaya Nano Finance Ltd. He was also on the Investment Committee of the Aavishkaar India Micro Venture Capital Fund in its first three years (2003-2006) and is on the Investment Committee of the Menterra Social Impact Fund.

Positions and recognitions

Source: ^[18]

Vijay^[19] has been listed in “60 Outstanding Social Entrepreneurs” by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship at the World Economic Forum, Davos, 2002; "India's 50 Most Powerful People" by BusinessWeek, 2009 and among "the twenty people who will reform India during this decade", by the Indian Express, 2011^[20]

He was a keynote speaker at the OECD Foreign Aid Ministers in Paris in 2004, the Geneva Private Equity Conference on Microfinance, 2005 and the Goldman Sachs global forum on microfinance, 2006, Several panels in the World Economic Forum, Davos 2010.

Awards conferred on him include:

• Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Delhi, 2003
• Ashoka Fellowship, 2008^[21]
• HSBC Access award for outstanding contribution to the microfinance sector, 2009
• Skoch Foundation Award for Financial Inclusion, 2010
• Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIM Ahmedabad, 2011
• Prerna Samman I(Inspiration honour) at Sankalp Event, 2013
• Rockefeller Foundation Fellow at Bellagio Centre, 2016
• MFIN Award for outstanding contribution to the microfinance sector, 2018

Publications

Vijay Mahajan has published over 60 articles on rural livelihood, development and micro-finance in international journals.

Some of his books include:

• "The Forgotten Sector: Non-farm Employment and Enterprises in Rural India”^[22][23] by Thomas Fisher (Author) , Vijay Mahajan (Author)
• "Microfinance – from the fire to the frying pan?"^[24] by Mr. Vijay Mahajan (Author) , Mr. Bikram Duggal (Contributor)

References

• April Haddon
• April Hadi
• Aprilhäxan
• Aprilia DOC
• Aprilia, Latina
• Aprilia Mojito
• Aprilia mojito
• Aprilia RS3 Cube
• Aprilia RS4 125
• Aprilia Yuswandari
• April in Love
• April in Paris Ball
• April in Portugal (disambiguation)
• Aprilis
• April Jace
• April Jeanette
• April Jeanette Mendez
• April Jones
• April laws
• Aprilla Yuswandari
• April Lee
• Aprille ericsson
• Aprille Ericsson-Jackson
• April Lee (wrestler)
• April Lerman