Visit of Dr. H. Harish Hande

We were sweetly surprised to receive a message on 11th January morning from Dr. H. Harish Hande, our alumnus and a social entrepreneur, Magsaysay Award winner of 2011. He was in the campus as Chief Guest of inaugural session of a conference. Earlier we tried to contact him based on the suggestion received in our Advisory Committee Meeting (Link). Dr. Hande gave about an hour in the morning where activities of NSS, IIT Khargpur were presented before him. In the second half, for more than an hour he visited the neighbourhood villages where NSS works and stopped at three villages. We received various ideas from him and he assured us to send more information and linkages. Attached in the right hand side a picture of this visit. Dr. Hande was talking about the condition of the kitchen where midday meal of the school is prepared and what can be done to reduce inhalation of black soot.

Many of us listened to his inaugural speech in the conference. Starting with a lighter vain and thereby getting the young student audience hooked, he went into what, why and how of social entrepreneurship, balancing curricular and extra-curricular from personal experience with ready wit and humour. If he is leading the solar lighting among the underpriveleged today with his unique model, he spent two years with people who were deprived of electricity by choice to understand the problem and figure out a solution. We thank Dr. Hande and look forward to his association.

Finally, an earlier lecture of Dr. Hande on leadership which touches on subsidy on our education, service to poor, sustainability, attitude of youth in national vis-a-vis international space, is an eye-opener in many a sense (Link1, Link2).