Sri. Vijay Mahajan

Though I have not seen Sri. Vijay Mahajan (Founder of Pradhan and Basix) personally,  my regard for him is growing day by day for his contribution to build a knowledge and practice base to the field of development. I have met youngsters, graduated from premier institutions, inspired by Sri. V.M. taken up development .

When one of my student Mrs. Nirmala who is with ISLP gave me a copy of “Resource Book for Livelihood Promotion” co-authored by Sri. V.M., I was impressed by the content and that made me to translate it in Tamil, so that the message can reach the grass root level workers, who cannot read the original in English. It may take some more time to get it published in Tamil. (Is not Nirmala?)

When I saw the January issue of “Seminar’ Monthly, I opened those exact pages of Sri. V.M’s article “Scaling up Social Innovation”. Mahajan is known for his holistic  and integrative thinking and his article is an expression of his inner self. By going through that five page article, one can understand, how individuals and institutions enriched the efforts of development through their socially innovative ideas. The article  is not only a concise history of innovative development efforts and contains practical steps that can be taken up to speed / scale up social innovation. Mahajan concluded that “social innovation incubated in the voluntary sector must learn to embrace state or market institutions for scaling up, otherwise thousands of bonsai innovations may bloom, but society’s big problems will remain unresolved”.

I am happy that when I read the Resource Book for Livelihood Promotion, I conceived a poster with one of my friend Mr. Rajesh and ISLP faculty used it in their training.

When I read Mahajan again I thought of converting it into a mind map. I feel that development can be taught better, if we incorporate more and more ICT tools.

I considered my self as a computer illiterate, learned computer by using it. Those who see the mind map presented here based on Mahajan’s article, find that the map is self explanatory, this post has achieved its mission. If any one who are better skilled in using computer can make the article as an interesting teaching material with animations and hyperlinks. I hope that, I will be fortunate enough to see such a material very soon.