Five students of IIT-Bombay have given a new meaning to E=mc² even as they turned humour into a career and laughter into profit. Kavita Kanan Chandra meets the engineers behind Humorbeings

Attending elite schools in various countries, Shaheen Mistri remained insulated from Indian realities once. Kavita Kanan Chandra meets the founder of Akanksha Foundation and Teach For India

Just 220 km away from Mumbai in Purushwadi village, building a house is a totally different ball game. What people watch out for is not interest rates but the rains, says Tejaswi Damaraju

Inspired by the Grameen Bank of Prof. Muhammad Yunus, Ram and Smita returned from UK to start Rang De, a social enterprise that offers small loans to the rural poor.  P C Vinoj Kumar reports

Travelling across rural India on a Grassroutes fellowship, Akshat Shukla met Kishen Da in Chaukhuta village in Uttarakhand. The farmer crusades for self reliance in the mountainous village

Even in these days of social networks, it is hard for a coolie’s son to strike a meaningful friendship with an engineer. But such friendships are blossoming. Orchie Bandyopadhyay finds out

12-year-old Utkarsh Tripathi started a newspaper as he wanted to serve the country in some way. Arpit Gupta has the story of the youngster who publishes a handwritten newspaper from Allahabad

Using science in effectively managing money, Tara Thiagarajan has given a new perspective to microfinance. Fehmida Zakeer meets the woman who offers the lowest lending rate for rural women

Does a successful business venture go against social needs? No, say social entrepreneurs, who argue that the two can complement each other. Paul Basil, founder of Villgro, tells you how

A reporter's dilemma - to say the whole truth or just do what he is expected to - led to the launch of a newspaper for the common man. Basudev Mahapatra reports on Chandra Mishra's dream paper

Within the high walls of a jail in Andhra Pradesh there is BPO facility that not only employs prisoners but also prepares them for a life after they are set free. Rama Devi Menon has a peek

With no time to protest felling of trees, Siddalinga Prasad launched a project that ties people’s heart to trees. Marianne de Nazareth finds out that it’s a positive way of conserving nature

Two paper makers are using elephant dung as the main raw material. Roohi Saluja Sehgal learns from Mahima and Vijendra how they discovered the potential of ‘waste’ during a trek to a shrine

Voice of Village is the eponymous name given to the news service. Mohd Faisal Fareed finds that the novel method of news reading over the mobile phone is a hit in the village in Uttar Pradesh. For the rendering is in local Awadhi dialect

He impressed Barack Obama with his innovative business model though he hails from a state not known for entrepreneurship. Kavita Kanan Chandra talks to Irfan Alam, the social entrepreneur