The country has witnessed some turbulent times in the last three years. The Reserve Bank of India, helmed by Governor Shaktikanta Das, has helped India sail through this with the right combination of prudence and regulatory forbearance. During Covid, RBI made liquidity and credit available in a timely and targeted manner to the borrowers who most needed it. When Covid passed, RBI was prudent enough to roll back these measures quickly. It kept up its stringent regulation of banks and NBFCs through tough times. The RBI has adroitly steered monetary policy to strike the right balance between inflation and growth in India. RBI has been a champion of innovation too, nurturing India’s world-beating digital payments ecosystem, while opposing risky instruments such as cypto-currencies. In the last five years, the relationship between the RBI and the government has been amicable too, with coordinated efforts to power the economy.

What started in 1946 as Kaira District Cooperative Milk Producers Union with two village dairy co-operative societies and 247 litres of milk, has transformed into a huge FMCG brand with a consolidated turnover of Rs 72,000 crore, processing close to 30 million litres of milk daily. Founded in Anand, Gujarat, the formidable triumvirate of Chairman Tribhuvandas Patel, Dr Verghese Kurien and dairy technologist HM Dalaya built up the institution that is Amul. It’s a trusted model that can transform an economy. And the biggest and most vital component of this model is the farm producer and then the consumer who relies on them. Now, Amul has set itself an ambitious target of hitting a turnover of Rs 1 lakh crore in the next couple of years.

Founded by Neha Bagaria, a Wharton graduate, who restarted her career by founding JobsforHer (now HerKey), with an aim to reverse the female brain drain from within the Indian workforce. The vison is to enable women realise their full potential by connecting them with the right opportunities. HerKey has served over 3.5 million women across India. It also intends to expand its lean team of 115 to 400 people in the next 3-4 years. The online platform currently boasts of 15,000 companies, approximately 1,000 learning partners and about 2,500 mentors. Its business model revolves around three fundamental pillars: opportunities, education and community. The platform, out of its four million registered data base, has eight lakh monthly active users and has a social media reach of 15 million.

Founded by Safeena Husain, Educate Girls, a non-profit organisation, aims to improve access and quality of education for 15 million girls by 2025. What started as an experiment in 2007 in 50 villages of Pali district in Rajasthan has become one of the country’s leading organisations in the field of girls education. Its vision is to ensure that 10 million girls complete their 10th grade in the next 10 years. The organisation’s efforts have involved collaboration with over 18,000 dedicated community volunteers, leading to the enrollment of over 1.4 million out-of-school girls and ensuring a 93 per cent average retention rate for these girls. Also, it has achieved substantial improvements in learning outcomes for over 1.95 million children.

Stellapps Technologies is a start-up that works on digitising the dairy sector. Its suite of solutions helps farmers manage their herds, monitor heath of cattle remotely, offers insurance cover for cattle, animal nutrition and veterinary services. It also helps them access credit, provide market linkages and realise payments into their bank accounts. Stellapps has built technologies for a milk supply chain such as monitoring of the cold chain, bulk milk coolers on a real-time basis, using sensors and IoT-based devices. Its tech solutions are used by over 3.5 million farmers in over 42,000 villages spread across 17 states. About 10 per cent of the organised milk market in India is touched by Stellapps’ tech, helping improve cattle productivity by about 39 per cent.

The PMJDY was the first major programme of the Narendra Modi government announced on August 15, 2014. As on date, almost one in every five accounts is a Jan Dhan one. More than half of such accounts are held by women and more than two-thirds have been opened in rural/semi-urban areas, a true picture of financial inclusion. Now, there are more than 50 crore PMJDY accounts having total deposit balances of over Rs 2 lakh crore. The number of rural/semi-urban accounts is 33.86 crore with women beneficiaries at 28.14 crore. The average balance in accounts is Rs 4,000. By bringing marginalised sections of society into the ambit of formal banking the PMJDY scheme has reduced financial untouchability.

CherriLearn, an education app created by Shrinidhi, 21, offers gamified lessons in regional languages to children of standards 1-5. Each math and language lesson is gamified, where students rise up in levels as they answer questions correctly. It is offered at Re 1 a day and the target population is primarily tier 3-4 towns. Currently, close to 1 lakh students across India are associated with CherriLearn; almost 70 per cent from Karnataka and around 50 per cent from the Kannada medium. He is also looking to address the need of students in primary education as there are many digital learning solutions for students of Standard 10 and above. CherriLearn also offers learning solutions in the CBSE syllabus.