Impact Shakers City Guide: Thane with Vidyadhar Prabhudesai
Since travel isn’t what it used to be, we decided to travel the world through our Impact Shakers City Guides, in which a member of our community shares some of the highlights of their city’s impact ecosystem.
We’re meeting entrepreneur and global changemaker Vidyadhar Prabhudesai in Thane, India.
Vidyadhar: Although at first, my path led me into corporate life, I quickly learned that I was a complete misfit to multinational corporate culture. Soon, I co-founded LeadCap with Sangeeth Varghese. We started with ‘a million leaders’ mandate — to transform the lives of 1 million people into the next generation of leaders who can become role models for all of us. The inspiration came to me when I was working and I realised that youth who live in tier 2,3 districts of India, have immense potential and can challenge anybody from Tier 1 cities like Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore. Unfortunately, they don’t have access or are given the right opportunities to prove their potential. We decided to build India’s first Leadership Village in a small village of the Waynad district in Kerala. The movement continued and we launched the first ever leadership online channel and ran webinars every weekend on leadership starting almost a decade ago now.
LeadCap works with international institutions such as the United Nations, World Economic Forum, World Bank and governments of various nations. We work on the macro-economic, competitiveness of nations, future readiness, public policy and impact assessments. To give an example we publish the Global Sustainability Index (GSI) together with the International Foundation for Sustainable Peace and Development. GSI covers 4 aspects — Environment, Economy, Society and Governance for 76 countries, mapping the efforts of these nations in meeting their present needs without compromising the future. But we always keep our end goal in mind, to create 1 million new leaders.
Your city and ecosystem
Thane is one of the most promising cities of India and its impact ecosystem is young and vibrant. Thane is the home of the majority of migrants from outside cities, who come to Mumbai for employment.
There are quite a few incubators within Thane. Thane Municipal Corporation started the incubator Global Impact Hub last year, which is now converted to an emergency covid center and 1000 bed hospital, to accommodate healthcare needs of the city. To nurture innovation and entrepreneurship at very grassroots and early stages many schools and institutions from Thane partnered with NITI Aayog Govt of India and started Atal Incubation Centers, Atal Innovation Mission Tinkering Labs etc. I currently serve as a mentor there and I’m so excited about the potential of these young companies.
Apart from these, there are several incubators like Jio GenNext and CIBA. They have annual intake programs like BaseCamp by Jio GenNext which helps startups in strategic investment, commercial partnerships and mentoring. Jio GenNext is backed by the country’s largest business house Reliance and more than 150 startups are incubated there. They focus on B2B startups across verticals ranging across healthcare, education, fintech, agriculture, learning and development. They advise and mentor exceptional founders to evaluate the business plans to finetune them and make it pitch ready for the Jio Management, fast-tracking investment discussions by connecting startups to the right stakeholders. CIBA is a technology based incubator. They support and nurture startups by providing services such as incubation, modern office spaces, mentoring, networking opportunities, seed funding and rapid prototyping. There are more than 100 startups incubated employing 500+ people. There is also Thane Startup Club which is an association of startups, helping to build the Thane ecosystem.
Thane as a startup destination emerged late. But these startups are accelerating at a higher pace compared to other cities or locations. A prominent one I know is Cityflo which provides AC Bus commute to longer routes and connects Thane with Mumbai City and Navi Mumbai. There are also a couple of FinTech startups like KRAM for online loan lenders, SafeX a white label payment gateway, InvoiceMart invoicing tool for MSMEs and Finzart for online loan comparison. In EduTech there is Captest an online and career analysis platform and Edwiser an LMS platform.
In general, most startups are building a brighter future for the region and it’s very exciting to be a part of this growing ecosystem!
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