Shailesh Kataria

Swades Foundation

Founded by Ronnie & Zarina Screwvala, we operate with a single-minded focus of empowering 1 million Rural Indians every 5-6 years. We are bringing together best global practices, corporate thinking and accountability, highest standards of corporate governance to create a model of sustainable development, which is an industry benchmark and replicable at scale. Our vision: Build a model for sustainable and irreversible change by empowering rural communities to become self-dependent, creating rural communities as a strong asset to 21st century India. Our strategy: To Engage, Empower, Execute and Exit. To engage rural communities with corporates, urban youth, NGOs and governments and empower them to co-execute programs that transform their lives which enables our exit, creating role models and change agents for the rest of the country. We currently execute ~35 programmes in our geography and work with partners including Tata Trusts, Reckitt Benckiser, Deutsche Bank, UTI AMC, HSBC, Mahindra & Mahindra AFS, HDFC Bank, Australian Consulate - General Mumbai and RBL Bank to name a few.