Innovation is not just a concept, it's also a process. You cannot say that this is one product or one service that I'm going to deliver to my beneficiaries. You constantly have to evolve and for that evolution, you have to be part of the innovation cycle. As a social innovation consultant what you are trying to do is that you're looking at Innovation on the ground and trying to see how you can help to make the processes better. For example: when I worked with a start-up in Kenya, I tried to help them design their business model and figure out how they could make it into a functional enterprise. Similarly, I also worked with Ashoka to help them identify how they can work as social innovators on the ground.

It was my first job in the public sector. That's the first job I took after Amani, and I took it as it was in the project management unit. Our main goal was to set up everything from the ground for the smart cities project which was funded by a central point agency and the European Union. It was a funding of around 100 million Euros and we had to allocate that within the cities in India. We had competing cities and we had to make a selection. We had to build the whole system from scratch where we selected people who are going to work in these cities and then were trying to bring them on board with the other things involved. We were operationalizing an agreement of vision, which was agreed between the two governments, and we were trying to constantly work very closely with the city governments as well as the donor agency and the ministry to kind of bring that vision into light. I was trying to build a technology platform to operationalize all this. At Goldman Sachs, I had designed Technology platforms for regulatory issues and I was kind of able to bring that knowledge here. So I think that was something which was really exciting for me to be able to stay connected to technology as a tool. The other interesting thing which I got to experiment was around monitoring and evaluation. I got a chance, not only to design monitoring and evaluation for the program, but I also worked with each of the cities and the city officials to work on the monitoring and evaluation system for the individual projects. It was great and we had a very small yet very diverse team. There were so many fresh ideas that we were dealing with on a day to day basis that I think excited me a lot. I was interested in urban sustainability, so it aligned with my interest a lot. And I think it was kind of my first initiation towards this sector.

So the interesting part of that initiative was that it was not just about designing or conceptualizing. It was about implementing. So, our cycle of designing something and implementing it was very small. We were kind of a management unit deciding that this is how a particular part of it should be conceptualized and we delivered it. So our core function was delivering the projects which are running on the ground to make sure that everything from a programmatic level happens.

After a few years in the corporate sector, I just felt that I needed to go back to the social sector. I cannot contribute to something, which is not adding up to some value for anyone while being in the corporate sector. According to me, by being in the corporate sector, you're just helping the rich people become richer and I just didn't want to do that. And then I started thinking of ways as to how I can transition back into more impact creating spaces.

I want to be someone who's more engaged and I didn't want to be in that comfort zone, I have always felt the need to be uncomfortable. I realised that I just can’t work in such a space where I wasn’t really able to contribute and make an impact on society. So I think that's something which kind of triggered me to change my path. You should always choose the right people to work with as they make the work simpler. According to me, we make the greatest impact on the people whom we work with, rather than the company as a whole and this is what really matters.

I was looking for something which can act as a bridge between my private sector experience and transitioning into the social sector. So, I was looking at multiple options. I was also thinking of directly taking a job, which will help me implement private sector skills in the social sector. The other opportunity I had was to implement engineering solutions to social solutions which haven’t been matched yet. I was also considering going for masters and pursuing courses like public policy or public administration but that required a huge amount of money. The other thing which I was very sure of was that I wanted to take a break and have some warming up and explore a bit.

Nirmaan gave me an opportunity to explore these things. As a full-timer, you have so much pressure on you to be right and to be able to justify what you're doing. But when you're exploring it as a student, you can always expect failure and it becomes more of a learning experience than it is as a full time person and so I think Nirmaan gave me that space to explore this whole idea about development, grass root volunteering and all these things that people speak about. You do something early and you fail early so that you can learn better and you can do better things later on. Nirmaan helped me build my orientation towards how I look at development. I know that there is a part of me which is still connected to the ground. This comes from the experience that I gained there. When you think of what this particular policy is going to do when it goes on the ground, I can always think whether people will actually benefit from this or not and I think that that is something which is important to be able to relate to.

I was considering all the fellowships, like CMG GA or your District development Fellowship by the government of Punjab, Teach for India and other government fellowships. These fellowships offered me an opportunity to work at the grassroots level which wasn’t really an attraction because I had already done that in association with Nirmaan, Pilani. So, I was looking for something other than ground volunteering which can tie back with my passion to do something for the grassroots levels. I knew that I can do much more than just volunteering and thus I narrowed down to two options: the Young India Fellowship, which is in Ashoka and then there was Amani. And I think the only reason I chose Amani rather than the Young India Fellowship was that I found the Young India Fellowship a lot more academic while Amani was more practice oriented. And Amani’s focus was very different and unique because they were trying to build and work on social entrepreneurship and the way they do it is with a mix of learning and practice. These were two and a half days of workshops where you are being taught about leadership, design thinking, bio empathy, etc. There were people from different countries and backgrounds, and so there was just a lot of diversity with which people were coming and I think that attracted me. I thought that I’ll definitely learn something here.

It was mostly through my network. I did not reach out to people directly, instead I came across posts on my fellowship groups about different volunteering opportunities. I got in touch with the person designing the initiative and she had not selected any volunteers till then. We had a discussion and we both really connected. We were like okay this is an experiment and we can do this. I think that was also a time when I was really open to trying new things. A lot of times when you're working on something pro bono, you're working just for yourself and your learning and you're not really tied to something else. I really had that creative freedom in my mind and was with the attitude that I could do, whatever I liked.

Policy as such is a very broad area. It is very complex and the way things function, there definitely is political inference. Wherever you have a democratic elected candidate, who is at the helm of designing policies and taking policy decisions, there's definitely some kind of political element that is going to influence what comes into being. You also have to respect that at times. You have to respect that even though you might not personally agree with a particular scheme or a particular policy. You cannot say that I know better than the rest of the people. I have always been a little skeptical about these things, I don't want to be somewhere where I'm influenced by someone else's political views, but I also feel that policy making is a space which is always going to be affected by that. Policy design, in that sense, is a very difficult space. One is because you might not always agree and the other is that you know that whatever you're suggesting might not always be implemented. Even the cycle of implementation is pretty long in that sense, whatever you are designing today might be implemented five or six years down the line. That is another element to policy design, which I have learned and is important to understand. There are multiple activities that we do, there is one part which I'm involved in where we design indicators. We design what exactly are the outcomes each scheme is going to deliver for the government, from a particular budget. That is a kind of an annual activity we do. That is a document, which is published along with the Union budget every year. And that's something that will immediately be implemented, you spend six months on it and then it is published. So you have to also stay within the limits of the way the government functions.

Most of the people are going for private capital so I think that the value added these days is not just in CSR but also making sure that whatever your company is doing, it's doing it ethically and sustainably. The vision and goal of the company is something that you and I cannot change when we enter as early professionals. It’s not really about the space you are working in. It’s about the impact you create in your space. This impact starts from the people who work closest to you first.

I think fellowships definitely give you a lot of exposure on the ground, but I also very strongly recommend volunteering. I still try to find some places where I can work for free because I think those are the places that you learn the most at. Volunteering also gives you a lot of humility, doing the most basic of the things in the development sector teaches you a lot. So, I think you should always look out for that. There are fellowships that you can always take to do it full-time. You can always apply for something like, Young India Fellowship or do a masters, which is more focused on social, political and economic development policies. And I strongly feel about doing masters or doing an further education, more grounded in social sciences, because I think that that's something which is missing in the engineering curriculum, and that has really decremental effects on the way things are seen. Because most of our Engineers are not trained in social sciences and to think about inclusion is like thinking about abstract concepts. So, I think the brightest of the minds who are coming from places like BITS and IITs should have stronger exposure in this area. If you get a chance and if you have the opportunity to study these subjects you should definitely do that. And yeah I think apart from that, impact is not limited to a space. It's not by being in an NGO that you can create an impact, do something valuable with a social enterprise like do something valuable with a health tech and make sure that that the service is not limited to people who are privileged like you and me but it's also available to the needy.

Impact sector is so much bigger than what I had thought of when I had initially started out. There are multiple things that I'm thinking about, one thing that I'm really passionate about is urban sustainability and climate change, and I think that's an area that I really want to explore, but I do not have any academic background in it or any experience. So, one of the things that I'm thinking of is masters. I want to mix the kind of design and innovation orientation that I got with my experience with climate change and see what can come out of it. But then, I don't want to study in India, and if I want to go abroad I would have to take a loan which will require me to work in some firm like Goldman Sachs to repay it. I do not want to get into the same cycle so I find that option futile. I could also go for a Fellowship instead of a masters. CSR is also an interesting place to explore, but I have not come across something which has excited me so far in CSR. But I think that would also be an option when maybe I want to settle down.

College life! Oh my God, I'm not the best person to talk about college life. I missed most of my classes. I would say that I chose the classes that I wanted to attend, and would go to those very regularly. So I had this course called modern political concepts which Professor Hari Nair took, that was one class to which I went regularly and enjoyed. We had very nice discussions and most of the times the attendance used to be pretty low. I used to be the only female in the class mostly and he would always ask me about my opinion during these discussions. Nothing is more valuable than your time so utilize it efficiently. And always remember you're in college for learning so make sure that you learn, where you learn from is totally your choice. Lastly, don't be hard on yourself. For example, in the pandemic if there's a space that doesn't acknowledge what you have gone through then that space is not worth your time.