By:

Aseem RohatgiPGP-14-010
Karanvir SidanaPGP-14-025
Monisha MohanPGP-14-032
Nikhil SharmaPGP-14-034
Sonal DagarPGP-14-068
Sriram ChepuriPGP-14-070

1. What are your learning and key management insights from

practitioners from different fields- law, livelihoods, finance, social
and arts?
Heroes Speak saw speakers from diverse fields namely finance, arts,
livelihood, law, and social development. Each one of them had their
own inspiring story demonstrating their unique contributions to our
society. Their speeches explaining their struggles to uplift the status
of women clearly brought out the theme of the event: Women
Empowerment: The quest for true independence. The
insights we gained from the event had some valuable management
lessons imbibed in them.
Mr. A. Muruganantham also and rather more popularly, known as
The Sanitary Napkin man of India is a hero we all should look up
to. He thought of an unconventional and unique business idea of
developing low cost sanitary napkin which won him the Best
Innovation National Award in the year 2009.
Mr. Muruganantham, through his wide spread campaigns wants to
take sanitary napkins to each and every women across India. His
aim is to make our society accept menstruation as a natural part of
womens life and to lift the stigma associated with it. A true nonconformist, he has completely reversed the basic logic of decision
making. He says All you need is a problem. Look for a problem, not
an opportunity. This is the kind of thinking which brings out the
entrepreneur inside a person. He has all the characteristics of a truly
transformational leader, with a number of people standing against
him including his own wife and after being labelled as a mad man
never gave up and kept working towards his noble cause. He set up
a small industry in Bihar to manufacture sanitary napkin with the
help of Maoist and Naxalite women. He completely changed the
traditional definition of Research and Development when he actually
wore the napkins himself to test them. His marketing initiatives
involved going door to door and village to village to spread
awareness about his invention and encouraging women to use
them. Mr. Muruganantham has been facilitated by several
noticeable dignitaries from across the world. The production houses
from Australia and Singapore have a future film dedicated to him
which depicts his story.
Mr. Jockin Arputham, another hero who inspired us all with his
contributions which have helped generate livelihood for thousands
of women across the world. He works to empower the urban poor in

30+ countries across 3 continents. Mr Jockin is the voice of the

poorest people in the worlds biggest cities.
WOmen-Well Organized Men, has been his ideology which has
driven all his actions. He has identified three prominent pillars
essential for slum development: Information, Communication and
Money. He spoke at length on Mahila Milan, a womens rights
protection unit, and how it came into being. Community police
panchayat, another brain child of Mr. Jockin, composes of 3 men and
7 women and works towards upliftment and growth of women in
slums.
Accompanying him to the event was a group of middle aged women
who described how they assist the local police in solving criminal
cases in the slums. It was astonishing to see how a group of women
have empowered themselves and have become an integral part of
the local government and administrative bodies. They fight for their
people and are essential to ensure a quick delivery of justice. They
demonstrated their effectiveness, their functioning and their
abilities with some truly motivating examples. It taught us of the
importance of the informal structure present in every society and
how it can be leveraged to help people maintain their composure
during difficult times and most importantly bringing the criminal to
justice.
It is truly said that women empowerment is incomplete without
finance. Ms. Chetna Gala Sinha is another hero who has
dedicated her life working for financial inclusion for thousands of
women across the entire country. Ms. Sinha started her journey
working for the women in the draught prone areas of her country.
She worked to improve their standard of living by developing and
polishing their entrepreneurial skills. Mann Deshi Mahila Bank has
been her biggest and most significant contribution towards financial
inclusion. Working tireless towards microfinance, her bank has given
loans of over $3 million to over 127,000 clients across our nation.
She spoke how her conversations from women from all walks of life
facing a number of difficulties helped her design the various
schemes and product offerings at her bank. She told the spectators
about a small girl who wanted to buy a bicycle to go to school daily
as she feared that her school being so far from her home might
make her give up her studies. This girl was given a chance to intern
with the bank and Ms Chetna came up with a scheme to offer loans
without interest to buy cycles. Ms. Chetna taught the importance of
customer interaction and how a business is truly dependent on its

customers for success. It is essential to find out what the customers

wants and to perform the need-gap analysis to fulfil those demands.
A lawyer and a leading women rights activist, Ms Flavia Agnis,
spoke about her organization Majlis. It was cofounded by Ms Agnis
as a legal and cultural resource centre. Majlis has provided legal
representation to more than 50,000 women in cases of economic
rights, property settlement and marital issue. She shared with her
experiences and real life examples where Majlis helped women get
justice at the highest judiciary institutions in our country. She
demonstrated with multiple examples why decentralization of power
is essential to ensure fair and just delivery of justice. Ms. Agnis
strongly feels that capital punishment should not be the objective in
cases of sexual abuse and said that most of the times they are a
result of public restlessness and outcry. Time and time again she
reiterated that victim support and not death penalty is the solution
in such cases. She says that most of the time the society shows her
back to the victim who ends up being treated as the culprit. It is
essential to have a solid judicial framework to ensure quick, efficient
and fair delivery of justice.
2. How can arts and culture act as an enabler to motivate and
transform the lives of the marginalized? Illustrate with examples:Art education programs and cultural events help to bring about
creative engagement among the people who have suffered trauma,
addiction or violence.
It fosters a sense of meaningful engagement among them and
provides them with a skill which enables them to assert control over
their lives and get acknowledged by other people apart from
providing them with basic assistance.
It has been shown in various studies that student from lower
socioeconomic status with higher engagement in arts have lower
school dropout rates compared to students from higher
socioeconomic status who have low participation in arts. Children
who are homeless, victims of abuse can be motivated to enroll in
arts & cultural events that allows them to escape from their past,
and gradually help them in developing control over their life.
Innocente, an artist on whose life a documentary was made that
went on win an Oscar, is one such example of Innocent as a
daughter of undocumented immigrants and victim of abuse. After
walking in to an arts center she began painting and was able to sell
her paintings to avoid living on the streets.
Ms Mitha Vashisth was able to provide a new beginning to the abuse

victims by helping take charge of their lives and gain self-respect.

Similarly Ms. Lindsey Bogan initiated ballet lessons for the foster
care childrens who had been neglected and abandonment. Both Ms
Vashisths and Ms. Bogans programs allow the youth to use the art
forms as coping mechanisms and functions as an outlet for all the
trauma.
Institutions like Sandhi Niketan, Yuvagram sell handicrafts made by
differently abled people like carpets, durries, handloom, greeting
cards etc. With the growth in technology, we should focus on
leveraging technology as a channel to allow the marginalized to
reach out to a larger audience and shoppers.