To help our readers better digest the prolific number of posts that appear throughout a given week, the ThinkChange India team will be providing weekly recaps on what posts garnered the most interest and also we will highlight some older posts that we feel deserve to be featured again.

From Sunday to Sunday — The Top Posts of the Week

1. Santosh wrote on the development of a new social capital exchange. (62 views)
2. A post by Prerna on For Love of Water (FLOW) enjoyed the second spot this week. (40 views)
3. Shital’s reporting on women barefoot solar engineers also got much attention this week. (31 views)

Highlighted Jobs, Internships and Other Opportunities

1. SKS Hyderbad is soliciting applications for a summer intern and Program Director. (31 views)
2. An internship for Source for Change also gained noticeable attention this week. (30 views)
3. Another post on an essay competition on climate change and health also received some focus by our readers this week. (29 views)

Reaching into the Archives

In this section we will link back to an older post that we believe deserves to be featured one more time.

Fresh off of the launch of ThinkChange India, Vinay wrote an Op-Ed on the value of having both arrogance and humility with regard to being a social entrepreneur. The post originally was published on March 3, 2008. (106 views)

We hope that these weekly recaps will help you better navigate our site and to make it even easier for our readers to keep up with everything exciting that is going on in India. Also, as always, we encourage all of you to keep commenting and participating as that is the best feedback to make sure we are doing a good job.

Best,

The ThinkChange India Team

• BoP Energy and beyond: BP has built a new stove for the BoP market that produces much fewer emissions than the typical wood burning stoves. Scaling up, the government predicts that by 2017, 10% of total transport fuel will come from biofuels. In order to improve public transportation in Hyderbad and the surrounding area, the World Bank has decided to fund a new bus rapid transit system.
• Microfinance: Growth of microfinance has been shown to be fastest in the Eastern part of the country while it has the strongest presence in the South. We wrote about it already here, but ACCESS’ partnership with Hindustan Unilever to provide potable water has been picked up by Microcapital.org.
• Education 2.0: Shital spoke before on the use of technology to democratize education. Now the CEO of Digital Media Convergence Ltd has said that education will be the driving force behind the adoption of IPTV.
• Healthcare: Despite efforts by government to help communities defray the cost of healthcare, most people still find themselves fronting the costs of such procedures and tests. The central government has amended the law regarding organs transplanted from cadavers.
  
• Culture: A small, indigenous group in Maharashtra continues to fight to preserve their mother tongue and heritage. In another story, one of the poorest communities in Assam has taken to international standards to help them emerge from poverty.
  

• State weakness report: Brookings Institute ranks India 67th out of 141 states in their new report that measures state weakness based on the criteria of economic, political, security and social welfare.
• Technology: Google released today Voice Search in Hyderbad which enables users to find business, restaurants, etc. by speaking the query into their mobile. In a similar act of tailoring products to the Indian subcontinent, Yahoo! released local language maps with directions.
• Telecom revisited: Building off of the momentum of the story in the Midday Newsfeed about the telecom spectrum, we are reporting here that the big three mobile GSM providers have been hit with a notice of enquiry for acting as a cartel and distorting prices.
• Travel: Pakistan is considering dropping the visa requirement for Indian travelers.

From the Social-Impact website:

Social-Impact is a new international professional development programme. Our goal is to accelerate growth and increase impact of social entrepreneurs’ projects and/or organizations. Social-Impact’s programme provides social entrepreneurs with:

• Mentoring
• Training
• Technical assistance consulting
• Networking opportunities and
• Access to financing

Our comprehensive and customized technical and financial services will enable social entrepreneurs to step up significantly their development toward scaling their organizations. The programme is offered to select candidates who have demonstrated exceptional progress in creating projects or programmes which address social issues.

The application can be found here.

There are no limits to human ingenuity as evidenced by an article today in OneWorld South Asia that speaks about an inventor that has discovered a method to weave silk without harming the delicate worms responsible for the fabric’s construction. According to the article, a single sari used to require the death of 50,000 worms!

One little known voice of compassion comes from Hyderabad, where Kusuma Rajaiah — after years of research — now produces silk without killing the worms.

Unlike other animal rights campaigns, the dire fate of the silkworm does not incite such attention. For many, however, the ability to use silk without causing harm is very significant. Doing so allows them to utilize the material in a nonviolent fashion, assuaging any moral reservations that could have otherwise arisen.

“All my products are done on handlooms and benefits several weaver families,” says Kusuma. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, he calls this silk ahimsa (non-violent). While ahimsa silk may lack the shine of regular silk, it is comfortable to wear. It’s also wrinkle-free and has a better fall.