The InK Conference (which stands for Innovation and Knowledge) is being run by longtime TEDster Lakshmi Pratury, who co-hosted TEDIndia a year ago. TED has signed a content partnership agreement with INK that will allow us to bring the best InK talks to TED.com.

TEDIndia in 2009 was a thrilling experience, attracting a sold-out audience of 1,000 attendees from 46 countries. It was planned as a one-time event to bring TED to South Asia, and we’re delighted at what it’s led to: a thriving community in India and Asia who are passionate about the spread of ideas, a host of TEDx events, a massive increase in the numbers of Indians watching TED online … and now InK.

The InK Conference is being hosted by Lakshmi at the beautiful Lavasa Retreat near Mumbai this coming December 10-12, and all of us at TED will be cheering her on. For TEDIndia last year, Lakshmi pulled together an astonishing speaker lineup spanning business, science, technology, nonprofit organizations and the arts -– and for InK she’s doing the same.

The theme is “Untold Stories,” and confirmed speakers include Simpsons creator Matt Groening, entertainment icon James Cameron, designer Philippe Starck, prolific author Deepak Chopra, scientific visualization pioneer Alexander Tsiaras, the world’s youngest school headmaster Babar Ali, academic and author Jennifer Aaker, innovative science teacher Arvind Gupta, Lego designer John-Henry Harris, technology mavens Joi Ito and Kevin Kelly, venture capitalist and philanthropist Kamran Elahian, visual communication expert Nancy Duarte, spoken-word artist Rives, surgeon Susan Lim , photographer Rick Smolan and award-winning innovator Tom Wujec.

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InK is modeled on TED, and the talks will fit the familiar TED 18-minute format. We’re already excited at the prospect of posting the best of them. (Last year’s TEDIndia talks have proved to be big hits online, and we’re excited to continue this collaboration.)

As an organization, the InK Conference remains 100% independent of TED. Lakshmi and her team are fully responsible for the event. But we’re happy to be offering strategic advice and content distribution.

If you want to attend a live TED-like event in India, do consider registering for InK and joining up with thinkers and doers from a wide variety of industries, organizations and countries. There’s more information at www.theinkconference.com. It promises to be a wonderful experience. Stand by for some exciting new talks from a part of the world bursting with innovation, optimism and wisdom.

How did you get started in India’s independent music industry, and where has it led you?

When I was 17, I was working with a website called Gigpad. It was a networking site for musicians. I got into it from a designing and PR perspective, not really thinking that I wanted to get into the music business. But I was really well networked with musicians, since it was the only online community for Indian musicians. A band called Acquired Funk Syndrome (AFS) lived close by knew that I knew a lot of people. They needed some help getting gigs and spreading the word around. They came to me and said, “Do you want to travel with us and manage us?” And it obviously sounds like a good idea when you’re 17. So that’s how it got started.

Over the last eight years Only Much Louder has grown from one company to a group of companies, all dealing with the music business. Largely it’s the live music business that we’re a part of, so we do concerts, festivals … we have an artist management booking agency and a record label. It’s a lot of work revolving around independent music.

Being in India, Bollywood kind of takes away most of the space in anything that you do. But we’ve stuck around the non-Bollywood scene and have done independent music over the last few years.

This year is actually going to be the biggest for us. The kind of projects we have taken up are much larger than what we’ve done before. We’re putting together two big music festivals here this year: in December we’re doing the first indie music festival in India, and in January we’ve got The Prodigy coming down. It’s their first time coming here.

Right now every day life is pretty much consumed by work. But work’s a lot of fun, so I don’t really complain.

What sets Only Much Louder apart?

When we started, we were the first artist management company to work with independent artists. When we started the label, we were one of the first Indian labels to come out and have a proper set up. What differentiates us is that we’ve always focused on the non-Bollywood sector in India and that’s a pretty hard thing to do. Plus we’ve never really been limited to any genre; it’s just been about anything that’s independent, good, live, very flexible. So we’re managing everything form heavy metal bands to folk bands. We try to work with as many new artists as possible. Every year we sign on new artists – that’s been the goal of the company.

What innovative approaches has Only Much Louder taken?

Around 1999-2000, we had dial-up connections where you could download music that you never used to be able to get in India. Downloading music was really slow, but it opened this whole world up. Before that, let’s say you were a Pearl Jam fan, that meant you had one album. That’s what you’d get in India. And suddenly you had one hundred new songs to download.

I think a lot of the independent industry caught on to that much before the major labels did. The second band I started managing, called “Zero,” recorded some stuff, and we didn’t really know what to do. We weren’t going to go to a label, because it didn’t make sense. So we sat and burned about two hundred CDs. And I think at some point we realized that it would be much easier if people just burned it themselves and gave it to other people, rather than us sitting and doing this. It was really boring.

So on the other side of the CD we had instructions about how to burn it. All of that was pretty new here back then. So we explained this is what you do: get a CD writer, find a friend, buy a blank CD for just 20 rupees, and give it away. Just make sure that they burn another copy and give it to someone else.

We took a lot of pride in that. And the more we asked people to do that, the more people ended up buying the album, which was really strange. We did the first two hundred albums like that, but we were actually mass-printing albums after that. We did about eight to ten thousand copies by the end of the year.

How did you know it would actually make money?

There was no agenda of making money at all. You’re all 18, 19 and just putting out stuff … it didn’t cross our minds. In fact, all we were thinking was, “Alright, we’ve got to save up for two months to burn this CD and put it out.” We never even looked at it coming back. And once the money started coming in, we literally reinvested that in making more CDs, then we started making merchandise. Whatever you made in a night, you pretty much spent it in the same night. That’s what you did back then. There was no plan, really. In fact, I don’t think we would have survived if we had a long five-year plan or any of that. It was just about getting from one week to another and doing as much as you can.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?
Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.

If you’re a social entrepreneur or an entrepreneur in general, the first piece of advice is that almost all of us end up making the same mistakes in the first few years. And that’s absolutely fine. If we hadn’t made the mistakes we made at Only Much Louder in the first three to four years, I don’t think we would be where we are now.

The first mistake everybody makes is trying to do everything yourself. The biggest mistake and the silliest mistake is not having an accountant. When we sat down and looked at it, the better we did in every year, the less money we saved. Because we just didn’t know what was going on. We didn’t have the right kind of people taking care of the right things.

Second is trying to scale up too fast. You try to do too many things because you have many different ideas and want to do everything together. So you try to do a big project and it fails miserably. From that you learn that even if you have the greatest idea, start it one step at a time. Get that completely right, and it’s easy to scale up later on.

Those things can only be learned from mistakes. It’s just important that no mistake is big enough to pull you down. When those mistakes happen, it feels like it’s the end of the world. It feels like it doesn’t make sense anymore.But there’s always something else that comes, and you find another opportunity. From my experience, I see that people who hold on to it and really push it, survive.

The second piece of advice is that it takes time. I see a lot of people who want to do this and give it one or two years, and say, “It’s not working out.” I think the important thing is, if you’re really in it, if you’re passionate about it, it’s going to take a lot of time. We’ve been doing this for eight years and we still consider ourselves a start-up. Because every year you’re learning something new and trying to scale up. Give it time and patience.

Third, and most important, is the people and team that you build. So if you find the right kind of person, do whatever it takes to get him working with you. I think that’s the rarest commodity out there: finding the right kind of people to work with you on every level. Commitment-wise, mentally.

You’ve said that your aim is to empower and free musicians from labels, agents, and managers. As a manager, how do you reconcile that?

Management and labels and agents work in a very different format in India. So what I said is very contextual, because you don’t have this industry at all. You just have the artists, and you have the record label, and the record label controls everything in that. When I started out, it was almost as if I’d get into a business venture with each of the bands, and then we’d work it out together what we wanted to achieve, collectively. So it wasn’t us as a company saying, “Now you signed on with us, and this is what we do.” I think what artists need is basically to have one person be part of the team to take care of logistics so that they can focus on the music. So we see ourselves as part of an extended team, rather than a management company or a label.

The music industry is different here because if you just look at India as a territory, it’s like the whole of Europe. Every state speaks a different language. So you can’t have any strategy that can apply across the country. And that’s a big challenge when you market anything.

Second, the infrastructure is not that great. It’s getting better by huge leaps and bounds every year. When we started out, we had three venues in the whole country to play at. And how many times can you keep playing at the same venue, over and over again? So we had challenges like that. You kind of improvise, and start building your own venues in the sense that you convince people who just have spaces, to let you play. In universities, schools, and work it from the ground up.

One of the big differences, compared to any of the other foreign markets, is the film industry and the Bollywood part of it being so dominant. Here, the only reason ninety percent of music is made, is so that it will go into films. That’s the only reason the music industry exists here. And then you have about five percent devotional music, the other two percent is international music, and the remaining two or three percent is the independent music industry.

But the difference is, one percent of anything in India is a very large number, because of the size of the market.

So do you hate Bollywood music?

No, I think I started by hating it. Just because it was so commercial and it was all you heard. But it doesn’t matter anymore, for two reasons: I think the only reason the independent film industry exists is because of Bollywood. You’ve got something that is so dominant, so there’s automatically an underground that exists. There’s people who get sick of it.

Secondly, Bollywood has changed massively in the last few years. From A.R. Rahman, who kind of led the movement of different music coming into Bollywood, to a whole bunch of composers. In fact the biggest Bollywood composers have been in rock bands.

What have been some of your most memorable experiences from your job?

I started working with the band Swarathma about two years back. They’re from Bangalore, which is an urban-metro town and they use folk music, with rock, reggae, and different stuff. They use this very folk way of story telling and that’s how they tell about their songs. The way they dress up in traditional garb is incredible. But they were a big challenge. When you’re a band like that, you’re in the middle of nowhere. You’ve got your independent scene who thinks, “Oh, you’re singing in Hindi, you’re dressed up like this, so you’re trying to be commercial.” At they same time, they aren’t making songs for movies. So there is no commercial element to it. Developing a band like that is always a lot more challenging. But it’s really taken off. They’re going to Australia next month, they do about 100-odd gigs every year in India. That’s been a project I’ve been really attached to, and has worked really well for us.

In terms of events, I think the first festival we put together for a British company here was the Big Chill, which was the Indian version of the Big Chill Festival in the U.K. We did it as a two-day festival in Goa. It was outstanding. That was the first time that we saw people in India come for something with absolutely no big stars or Bollywood acts. It was just about music. There was no mainstream publicity, so it was just word of mouth. This was before the time of Facebook, so we had nothing. And still people turned out. And it was a great experience working with an international team, learning a lot from them. I think that was our learning grounds for how to build a music festival.

How has the TED Fellowship influenced you or your work?

It was huge. Before TED came to India, I was one of those people downloading every little TED episode that was out there. I was a TED geek. Still am. So getting the Fellowship itself was a really big deal.

It was incredible meeting the people at TED, and so many of them doing incredible stuff, all in India, and I’d never heard of them. And it was really diverse. I don’t know how TED chooses 100 people from an entire country, but the mix of people was just incredible. I think that’s the only three or four days that I’ve had in the last few years where I did absolutely no work. Phones were off. We just were there and soaking it all in. It was quite an experience.

Where do you see the music industry in India going next?

I actually don’t have any idea where the music industry is going to go, either here or internationally, because no one knows. You have to accept the fact that you have no clue what’s going to happen next. Just be ready to accept and work with whatever comes your way.

I keep thinking that in 1997 some record label executive somewhere made a 10 year plan. He didn’t know some kid was out there making an MP3 file. And that changed his entire world. And then came iTunes and the iPod and things keep coming, and it changes. You have to look at the immediate one year or two year plan, and that’s all that you can afford to do, if you’re being realistic. There are disruptive technologies being developed right now, which we have absolutely no clue about. And it’s going to happen whether we like it or not. So just keep it flexible and see where it goes.

Among other accomplishments, you’re a published poet, a TV/film director and producer, and creator of the African Movie Academy Awards. Of all that you do, what are you most proud of?

I think I’m most proud of the African Movie Academy Awards (AMAA). They are one of the things that has changed African cinema in a very positive way. The AMAAs started in 2005, and as I travel more, as I meet more people, I’m suddenly realizing, “Wow, I actually did do something.” People talk about the AMAAs as an event that brings all fillmmakers in Africa and from the African diaspora together.

With the AMAAs, we have an award where we recognize ourselves amongst ourselves, and there’s a stimulated competition between the African countries over who’s going to win the next one. So it makes better films for us. People actually go out of their way to make films for the AMAA awards.

It started out just as something I was going to do, so that we could have one day as filmmakers to meet and sit down together. But now it’s something that everybody looks forward to. So when I look back, I think that’s my biggest achievement.

Tell us about your other projects.

Africadopt is one of the projects that the AMAAs started as a Corporate Social Responsibility effort. It tries to get people to do virtual adoptions, in which they financially support a child in an orphanage. It’s slow work, but I think it will pick up. We try to make people understand that as little as a dollar makes a difference in a child’s life.

My business partner Dayo Ogunyemi and I are also building cinemas throughout Africa. These “Cinemarts” are community centers in rural and low income urban areas, anchored by digital cinemas fitting an average of three hundred people, with indoor and outdoor refreshments areas. Each ticket to a show will cost one dollar or less. We have a lack of cinema halls on the continent now. We’re building them so that there is a form of distribution for African films that can make some money for the filmmaker.

Over the last four years Dayo and I have raised funds and have built four cinema halls this year with several more rented. We eventually hope to build five thousand screens on the continent. What we’re trying to do is make sure every village, every local community, has a small cinema hall that can also be used during the day time to teach young people how to use the Internet.

And as another a project of the AMAAs, on October 17 we launched the African Cinema Film Fund. The fund will be a grant for filmmakers who don’t have the initial capital to make a movie. But it will be a revolving grant: filmmakers will have to give up a percentage their film makes, until it pays back the grant, and they own their film.

Why is bringing cinema to rural areas in Africa important?

Africa has a knowledge and history of storytelling, and this is just moving it to the next stage. These are films made for Africans, by Africans. One of the saddest things for us as African filmmakers, is that a lot of the films that are made in Africa — with the exception of Nollywood films — don’t get seen in Africa. Some of the historical filmmakers — like Ousmane Sembène — a lot of people on the continent have not seen.

There are so many positive things that come out of Africa that never get said or never get talked about. Most of the things we see on TV are the problems that we already know we have. There is poverty in Africa, there is illness, there is homelessness, but there are still a lot of good things in Africa — a lot of beautiful people in Africa that make the world go around in terms of their industry.

One of the best things coming out of Africa right now are the creative industries. We have a lot of brilliant writers, filmmakers and musicians. P-Square, for example, comes to America from Nigeria and sells out shows. We have dressmakers like Tiffany Amber who are now internationally renowned. All these young entrepreneurs are succeeding in the face of so much adversity. There is a vibrant youth culture going on in Africa, and these things need to be talked about, these things need to be shown.

Also, for the first time in Nigeria right now, we are asking that our votes count. We are actually making sure, using the social network media, to make people want to register to vote. Everybody is talking about it — so that we can get the right leadership we need in our country. With the right leadership, we’ll get the infrastructure that we need, and it will be easier for the world to see the positive things. That goes back to one of the reasons why we’re building the cinemas: so that we can also use them to show the other side of Africa, and make people more aware of all these things.

You’ve said your father and his unique philosophy was a major influence as you grew up.

Yes, I’m an only girl with seven older brothers, who are all tough, big guys. And I had the most amazing father who treated my brothers and I the same. In Africa it’s really unusual to have a father that would recognize his female child as equal.

My dad is today being studied by many universities across the world as a philosopher who had his own understanding. He had a philosophy that he called the “Holistic Approach to Human Existence.” He brought us up with the philosophy that money was not the biggest thing in the world. Money is the commonest commodity: everybody has it. So you don’t look down on people because you have money and they don’t. He taught us to respect all people.

My dad made me believe that if I wanted to climb the highest mountain, I could do it if I had a will to do it. He also gave me an understanding of the spiritual side of life, which has helped me create a balance in everything I do. At some points in my life when I floated away from Christianity, he said to me, “It’s all right to experiment. When you’re ready, you’ll come back and find yourself and you’ll know that everything is the same. But you have to have tolerance for every religion, because it’s almost all the same.” That was important growing up in a mixed environment, where you are surrounded by many different beliefs.

Tell us about Clicks, the magazine you started when you were 16 years old.

When I went to school in England, there were hardly any magazines that spoke to me — there was a void. Seventeen and the other magazines never talked about makeup for my skin. Clicks was about a mix of different people, of different shades of color, with different needs. It was about makeup for everybody’s skin, and it talked about what young people could do. That went on for about three years, and then I had to go to university and my mom insisted that I needed to concentrate on doing law.

You’ve written three poetry books. Can you describe your style?

Yes, the third one is almost finished. My poetry is just generally about things around me. Observations I make about things, or noises I hear around me, I try to put down into my own words. It’s about everyday stuff that I see. I get motivated to write when things happen around me or I feel I need to speak about something that’s really disturbing me. If I find that I’m not able to say it out, I write it. Sometimes when I get angry, sometimes when I get moody, or when I’m extremely happy, I’ll put it down on paper. And I think that’s one of the easiest ways — especially when you have seven brothers and a tough mother. [Laughs]

Tell us about the talk show you hosted in the 1990s.

The talk show for me was the same thing as my poetry. It was called “Piece Off My Mind.” I got people to talk about things that really bothered them, and they wanted to get it off their chest. We discussed things that sometimes taboos wouldn’t let us talk about. Just everyday people discussing issues like female circumcision, with people on all sides of the issues. We would just discuss things as openly as we could.

A lot of things get hidden. The talk show was about giving voice to voiceless issues. One of the reasons why I went into film was because I think it’s important to bring to view things that people don’t want to talk about. Some of my films have dealt with Africa’s outcast system. My next big project is a film on women and child trafficking.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?
Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.

I think you need to just keep going at it. Don’t give up.

You also need to follow the rules, so make sure you have answers to most of the questions you’re going to be asked. Do your homework. Be as prepared as you can be.

Most people who you will do presentations for expect you to be extremely good at them. Your presentations have to be short, concise, and to the point. For my presentation, I did a lot of homework, I studied different learning procedures, and I got somebody to teach me how to make presentations that would work. At first, I felt my presentations weren’t up to par, so I got people to show me how to put the presentations together. And I got some help TED from as well.

If you’re able to have the tenacity to keep going, be patient, and don’t expect miracles to happen overnight, you’ll actually make it. It’s a lot about working and not giving up on your dream. For me it’s been all about just keeping going.

You mentioned TED helped you with your work. Can you explain that?

Some of the presentation workshops were quite good for me because it helped me with what I’m presenting. I’m looking forward to when I get to do my first TEDtalk.

I also met some very interesting people at TED who are still my friends, and we still talk to each other. I wish there were more hours in the day so I could communicate with people more.

TED was an experience where I met a lot of people, and I felt I wasn’t doing enough. You meet all these great people who are all doing different things. It introduced me to a lot of people that I probably wouldn’t have met ever otherwise, because they were all in such different disciplines of work. And they all influenced me in a different way.

But I think we all left TED with the idea that we all need to do more for our communities. I think one of the biggest TEDtalks that has affected my life was the one by Sunita Krishnan, who talked about her experiences in India and being raped, and the children who are being raped. She spoke about what she’s been doing to set up a safe place for victims, and how she’s been changing the lives of those women who have been trafficked.

It’s one of the reasons I decided to do a film about trafficking. It left me with a need to do more for my people.

Can you give us an overview of each of your entrepreneurial projects?

I have been in the area of social entrepreneurship now for seven years. First, I became involved in setting up a professional, self-sustainable emergency ambulance service in India, starting with the city of Bombay. Second was setting up high-quality schools in peri-urban areas in small-town India, where quality schools don’t exist. And third, I have been supporting a rural supply chain project founded by one of my friends.

Right now, I’m working on the concept of fighting corruption with a project called bribebusters.com. The concept is to set up a fee for a service to fight individual demand for bribes from government officials, etc.

You’ve said that personal experiences led you to your involvement with each of these projects.

Yes, for example, the “Dial 1298 for Ambulance” initiative began because of a combination of three personal experiences. One, my mom choked in her sleep. My family and I didn’t know how to react. We put her in the back of the car and drove like crazy to the hospital. She survived, by God’s grace, but it was very touch-and-go and she was in the ICU for a few days.

A few days later, very coincidentally, my best friend’s mom collapsed in Manhattan. The response was very, very different. In four and a half minutes, the 911 ambulance came, attended to her, and transported her to the ER.

This was the trigger point for the thought process. A few months later, a very close childhood friend died in a car accident. And that’s when we decided to get out of the comforts of what we were involved in, and to get out and do something. My friends and I got together, pooled a little bit of money, and started with one ambulance. Now we are operating in five states. We have almost 300 ambulances and are still growing.

“Dial 1298 for Ambulance” has had a lot of success. How does your ambulance service compare to others in India?

There were no organized ambulance services across India when we started out. It was all very micro-fragmented, individual units. Most of those ambulances financially survived on transporting dead bodies — people didn’t actually call ambulances to go to the hospital.

We don’t transport dead bodies. We are life-support ambulances. It’s comparable to any quality 911 service in the U.S.

Before “Dial 1298 for Ambulance” even basic transportation for individuals without the ability to pay — even in life threatening situations — was unavailable. With our unique multi-level differential pricing strategy, “Dial 1298 for Ambulance” provides universal access to all.

Tell us about your other projects.

The schools project is coming along. I realized some time ago, that while there are really, really high quality schools in urban India — my daughter attends one — there are very few high quality schools in rural India. And that is mostly because of the perception that there are not enough people to pay a reasonable fee in rural India.

We decided that maybe we can’t do it in truly rural areas yet, but we can at least have high quality schools in small towns. Although most of the investment in education in India is actually going to urban India, we felt there is an opportunity to set up financially self-sustainable schools in small towns. The schools work on a cross-subsidized fee regime that makes it sustainable financially. It also provides education to at least a few underprivileged students.

There are regulatory challenges in structuring such a fee regime, and we are struggling with that at present. We do hope to successfully continue what we are doing within the regulatory framework. We now have two schools fully functional, of the same quality of top Indian schools, and two to be launched next academic year, in June.

The rural supply chain project is founded by my friend Harsha Moily. It’s actually his concept and project, but I agreed to become a co-promoter. Right now the project is working on setting up end-to-end dairy farming. Harsha is organizing this through self-help groups where small groups of women pool together their resources and buy cattle. The organization gives advice, etc.

The rural supply chain has a base of around 40,000 women, organized around self-help groups. Harsha manages the supply chain end to end for them, while they actually take care of things at their level.

The bribebusters.com project is very much at a seeding stage. It requires a lot of hands-on effort at the moment.

How does bribebusters.com work?

I got fed up with a situation where government offices and agencies ask for bribes.

Bribebusters.com is a concept that I am trying to organize into a professional service, in a corporate manner. It’s based on a number of small pilot initiatives that we undertook with individuals facing demands for bribes. Individuals often who are asked for bribes don’t have the time, resources, or know-how to fight this. What happens is that since they are so tied up with life in itself, either they have to give up what they are entitled to, or they end up paying the bribe, just to get on with life.

We provide a service where people who don’t want to pay bribes call us — like they’d call a plumber for a plumbing issue — they can call us if they have an issue of bribes. And we will take on the responsibility of fighting that demand, while at the same time getting whatever they are legally entitled to.

What do you like to do for fun, in your free time?

Right now, I am having a lot of fun working on the Bribe Busters initiative … My wife and daughter keep complaining that their idea of fun and mine don’t match!

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.

The three things that I would warn social entrepreneurs to do, is to actually put down the thought process of the idea into an actual business plan. It gives perspectives which otherwise will not be seen or evaluated.

Second, one has to be ready to be persistent with the idea. You can’t just float an idea and then walk away if there is no initial traction. Persistence is very important.

And third, while trying to implement your idea, it’s very important that you stick to ethics and integrity. Because it’s very easy to get persuaded to compromise on these small things in order to obtain your big goal. But it’s very, very important that one doesn’t do that.

How has the TED Fellowship influenced your work?

The TED Fellowship exposed me to a set of youngsters who had wilder ideas than I did — and almost all of them were pursuing their wild and crazy ideas without fear of failure. TED Fellowship is an unbelievable environment to be in. The bits of self-doubt which appear when thinking through wild and crazy ideas seem ridiculous … when you are surrounded by a bunch of youngsters fearlessly and confidently pursuing wild and crazy ideas.

What are your future plans?

I continue to work on the social enterprises that I am currently involved with … and, as I said, have fun building www.bribebusters.com initiative.

I also dream of being able to contribute to the development of my state and country by playing whatever positive role I can in public policy.

Watch Shaffi Mather’s TEDTalk on a new way to fight corruption >>

After quitting your job as a lawyer, you’ve begun evangelizing social media to India’s nonprofit sector. What are you working on these days?

Most recently I was handling the online page of a campaign run by an organization called Breakthrough. It’s a campaign about domestic violence, called “Ring the Bell,” or Bell Bajao. It’s a media campaign about what you should do if you hear of domestic violence in your neighborhood. This campaign had many components: TV, newspaper and Internet. I was handling the online bit of the campaign.

I worked on it for the last seven months, and it was quite interesting work for me to do. I moved on because I realized that whenever an organization is doing a social campaign online, a communications or tech consultant can only do so much in terms of setting up the campaign, strategies, and so on. After the consultant initiates the online work, I think it’s important for the organization’s staff — who is actually doing the work offline — to build the online conversations. They are the real people who have been working with victims and survivors on the ground, and who really know the issues.

There is a lot of work happening in the non-profit sector in India, but hardly any visibility of that work. The common person doesn’t even know what an NGO does … I wanted to dedicate myself to bridging the gap between the non-profit, the corporate, and the social world. I’ve been part of both the corporate and non-profit worlds, and I know that there is a big disconnect between these two sectors.

I also want to work on the digital divide between the rural and urban areas. It’s not as if people in the rural areas cannot understand technology. They can. If we just take technology to the rural areas, they can use it for their benefit.

So with all these thoughts, I set up my own consultancy called Samyukta Media. Right now, I basically meet organizations that are doing interesting work, and show them how to use freely available social media tools — like a blog, Facebook, or Youtube — for better visibility.

I’m also co-organizing an event meant to be a platform for non-profit organizations to come meet social media practitioners. There they can talk about various opportunities and methods. It’s called Social Media Baithak. The first of these Baithak was held last week, and it was a great success.

Did the TED Fellowship influence your career transformation?

Yes it did, hugely. Just the fact that I’m a TED Fellow, gave me the courage to quit my job — both corporate and from non-profit — and be an independent person with a mission of my own. It empowered me to start my own consultancy and become a social entrepreneur.

A lot of these things I was doing anyway for the last 4 years — I’ve been reading about them and writing about them — but I never had the courage to take the big step of becoming a social entrepreneur. Now I’m doing it and I completely owe it to my TED Fellowship. I have the entire community to collaborate. Whenever I will need some help, I can always send an email to the Fellows community or to other people I have met at the TEDIndia conference.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.

I’m also just starting out so I’m not sure I can give any great advice, but I think that if we want to become social entrepreneurs, we have to start talking in a very social language. Our language has to be extremely basic, jargon-free, and free from words that we usually use in context in the online world. An informal organization, giving late-night rural education for villagers, wouldn’t know what a blog is. They wouldn’t know what Twitter is. They wouldn’t know the word. But they can still use it if I contextualize it. So the language we use has to be very basic. We have to bring back human connection. We have to really be available for a face-to-face conversation.

Also one has to keep in mind a lot of sensitive topics. For example here in India, there are a lot of funds and concepts coming from foreign agencies and lands, particularly the First World. Sometimes there is friction in accepting them. There is a sense of “Why should we try to be like the First World? This is the Euro-centrism of the First World. They are trying to make us like them.” It’s very political. I really think this has to be addressed when we start working with certain political groups in the social sector. Not that they are anti-social media, but it is an issue that has to be handled with high sensitivity.

Tell us what makes your blogging style unique.

Blogging is the biggest chance event that has happened in my life. About five years ago I read that there was something new called “blogging” in the online world. So I just opened my blog and I simply started writing about my personal life.

I was at a point in my life where all my friends had settled down and gotten married — I was feeling very lonely. I had a lot to say and nobody to listen. I started writing whatever I wanted to say about my life. It contained a lot of personal information in terms of my relationships, heartbreak stories and things like that. It was the kind of personal information that few people would normally share. Particularly in the Indian culture, women are extremely controlled about what they’ll talk about regarding their personal life in public.

I didn’t think it would get a lot of attention but it did. As people read my blog, I realized that there was a lot about my writing skills and my own life that I was really proud of. I rediscovered myself. Instead of being embarrassed about sharing my personal life in public, I actually got empowered by being so open. I thought that if I’m being honest and this is the truth, then why should I be embarrassed about the truth? In fact, my blog is called, “This is My Truth.”

Soon the personal got political. I read a lot about feminist perspectives and I don’t believe in gender roles — I believe in women’s empowerment. All that transferred into my writing and my blog. I feel that so much control on women’s sexuality and women’s personal lives is actually a way of trying to keep their stories, dreams, and aspirations behind closed doors. Until you break this barrier between what is personal and what is public, a lot of stories that should be heard — for example violence stories — will stay hidden.

I got so many comments from other girls and women who said, “You write the same things we feel but are too scared to express.” That became another dimension to my blog: I write things that other people feel but they do not express. I know personally that women have been inspired by reading my blog. They started writing their own blogs after having read mine.

I also write some very general things like movie reviews, journalistic writing, humor, fiction and poetry.

What factors have made you in to the unconventional person you are?

I guess it is not having the fear of being different, or of being who I am. Blogging has fostered that. I had to face challenges like people’s reactions to my blog. People say “Why are you writing about all your life online? What are you trying to say? What are you trying to prove? Are you being an exhibitionist?”

In response to this allegation of being an exhibitionist, I articulated, in a more constructive way, what I’m trying to do by writing about my life. I reaffirmed to myself that it’s not about being an exhibitionist, but it’s about being who I am and being comfortable with who I am.

My liberated upbringing has also helped me in being different. In India, on the one hand, we have extremely liberated women. On the other hand, we have women with extremely suppressed personalities: women who cannot go out of their house without a male escort and things like that. But I have been brought up in the other end of that spectrum in a very liberated family, where everybody has equal say. So that has been part of my personality development.

Where is social media heading next in India?

Social media is catching up hugely in India. Facebook and Twitter have become the staple for every online presence. You have social media practitioners and consultants mushrooming rapidly everywhere.

It’s great but there is one problem with all of this. Most of the focus is on business-making entities and activities. Little work has been done in using social media for the non-profit industry or to benefit really poor people. I think it’s slightly ironic because social media tools were supposed to be for social good. Anybody should be able to use social media and have access to this whole new world that has opened up.

This is the gap between the well-to-do and the poor. One reason for the gap is we don’t have broadband in the rural parts of the country. But things like setting up Internet kiosks in the villages are happening now. I think that’s the big step ahead, where citizen journalism is going to increase: rural media and rural entrepreneurship.

There are other ways of bridging the Internet access gap. In fact, an initiative I did four years ago, and want to bring back, is called the Blogging Outreach Project. It was a workshop we did with 20 to 25 students from various departments like literature, social work and journalism. The idea was to teach blogging to these students, with the intention that they bring online the voices of those who cannot be online themselves.

For example, a rickshaw driver spends all day driving. He has no time or interest to  go online. But we can build a team of bloggers who would spend a day with these kinds of people and bring their stories and voices online.

It’s borrowing an idea from a TEDTalk by Ethan Zuckerman, the founder of Global Voices. His talk is about bloggers becoming “bridge figures” and connecting various worlds. They are bringing news from where mainstream media doesn’t reach. I’d like to combine this idea with my initial Blogging Outreach Project. Like Global Voices, I want to create bridge figures who will go out into various cultures and gather news and stories and bring them to a common platform so that everybody’s story is heard.

What work of yours are you most proud of?

That would probably be what I’m doing now, which is Babajob, a web and mobile portal dedicated to helping informal-sector workers — at the bottom 90% of India and the developing world — find better jobs and opportunities over the phone.

I came across a Duke University paper while I was working at Microsoft Research that said people get out of poverty primarily via income diversification. People go into poverty due to healthcare-related debt, but they usually get out by doing things like changing jobs.

What this particular paper found was that those people with the strongest social networks could find out about jobs and could use that to land a better job that could potentially pull them out of poverty.

So at this point three years ago I had this insight that said, “Well, if only we could figure out some way to digitize all of this information, and figure out ways to make it scale, we might be able to catalyze the escape from poverty by connecting people with some more data about their work and the job opportunities they have.”

In some ways this is a very capitalist idea — this is about efficient markets. The idea is, if you give people more efficient markets and give them access to data, people will take advantage of this for their own rational self-interest, make better choices and raise their income.

So for the last few years of my life I’ve been dedicated to helping to try to solve this problem at scale. I think we’ve done a reasonable job thus far: We’ve had about 130,000 users. We’re in India right now, and we’re expanding to Indonesia. Our services are live on five mobile carriers and we add another 2,500 people every week. And there are thousands and thousands of people that have gotten jobs through our site. Those are all good things.

How does Babajob work, exactly?

We work with telephone companies in India that help us do marketing. So people will get a message or see a billboard that says something like, “Do you want a better-paying job close to your house? Text us your postal code, a job category, and your salary.” And then we send these folks messages every day.

So for about 2 cents per day (1 rupee), you get a new job posting that’s relevant to you. People then simply call up for the employers that are nearby them, or offering a wage that they’re interested in, or share a language that they also speak.

They can text us specific data, use the mobile web, or call into a call center. Additionally, if one person learns how to use Babajob on their phone, they can add their friends and manage their profile for them. Soon we’ll be launching an automated voice line for non-literate users so they can sign up, search and apply for jobs, and leave messages for employers as well.

In general most of the people who use our site are not unemployed. Some of them are straight out of school at the 18-year-old level. But a lot of people are doing it because they want a better job.

One of the curses of development in the developing world is that, as incomes rise, the cost of personal transportation gets cheaper (I’m sure you’ve heard of the “One-Lakh Car,” or the $2,500 car), and motorcycles have gotten cheaper every year in terms of real dollars — all of these things have contributed to really, really awful traffic that gets worse by the day. You cannot spend more than four hours a day commuting yourself to a job, right? So we see tremendous demand from people to get jobs that are close to them in cities. A better job can mean that commute time is reduced, in addition to earning a higher salary or getting a job with a higher status.

On average we find that people that get hired on our site make 20.1% more, and they reduce their commute times by 14 minutes a day.

We find that lots of job seekers will come from very economically depressed rural areas. In the last decade, 100 million people have moved from the countryside in India to urban centers. And they’re doing that because they’re looking for better job opportunities. But it’s not like there’s a big job bulletin board in the village listing every security-guard job in Delhi. If you live 500 miles outside of Delhi, you don’t really have any insights into which ones have 12-hour days versus 8-hour days, which ones pay $120 versus $70 per month, which ones have training, which ones will hire a guy that speaks Hindi versus Tamil versus Urdu. You can see how access to this data has a huge impact on the incomes and quality of life that people can have.

What are the strengths and weaknesses of Babajob?

As for our strengths, we’re very focused on the bottom end of the sector. We don’t make the assumption that someone can read when they use our site, and we certainly don’t make the assumption that they use a computer. I think we have more insight into what a job seeker who’s poor goes through, and how they actually do their search, than anybody.

As for our learning curve, we’ve certainly experimented in terms of business model. When we began, we had a more traditional job-site business model where we charged employers. We also found it somewhat difficult to scale. Because credit card penetration is low in India, collecting money is difficult — you need guys on bikes if you want to go around to every city in India. We’re also learning how to integrate well with these telephone companies, which are a great vehicle for scale, but have their own needs. That’s been a challenge, but I think something we’re getting better at every day.

I worked at Microsoft for nine years, and I’d say there are things you need to unlearn. A lot of the action in India in the last five years hasn’t been around the web, it’s been around these mobile-related services. The way that you scale those services is different than how you do that in the States.

As one of the three founders of Microsoft Research India, you were responsible for designing its office. Can you tell us about that experience?

It’s kind of a hobby. My parents actually paid my way through college by fixing up houses. They are very good at looking at a piece of real estate and thinking about how people interact with it, and what it might take to make it beautiful.

When I moved out with Microsoft to India in 2004, I was very excited to take on the challenge of being in charge of the building. It was terribly fun. I spent the previous six years working and thinking about things like: How do we make people more social with software? For example, in Office and Windows Messenger and Vista. To do that in an architectural space is also really fun.

A building has hierarchies that are built into it.  As an architect of the space, you have to think about which one of these things you want. Do you give a presidential suite to the guy that runs the organization, or do you give him a cube like everybody else? These are real ways that values get reflected in a building. And it’s super fun to think about all those things.

And it was super fun to do that in an organization that was very empowered. And to also do that in a research organization where our PhD interns and workers were really the stars. We wanted to create an environment where people could think freely and collaborate and really felt it was the best possible place they could imagine to work.

I’m actually helping part-time with the design of their next building — it’s a lot of fun, I must say.

You’re a skilled musician. What led you to take up so many different instruments?

I grew up playing the piano. And then I was stuck in Boston for a winter and, long story short, I had to walk across the Longfellow Bridge uphill both ways in the snow every day and so I learned to play the harmonica to keep myself company and give myself something to do instead of concentrating on the cold. It’s kind of a solitary instrument and everybody usually teaches themselves.

It’s sort of a dream come true: My wife and I are in a band together, which is awesome. She is a VJ and I play a lot of bass. I like to play the bass because it makes other people dance.  You feel this wonderful sense of empowerment when you’re playing something and suddenly people are dancing to it. The bass does that to people.

It’s very fun to play with her and the others in our band, the Manjunauts. We’ve played at rock music festivals here in India. It’s five people on laptops and I think I’m the only one who plays a real instrument. I’d say the style is avant-garde experimental.

What’s in the future for sites like yours?

I have a hope that more technology can be used for social good. I think TED is a part of that movement, and other companies are part of that: trying to create technological, scalable inventions that have a business model behind them and try to help the poorest of the world have a better life.

I think there are immense opportunities in terms of making markets more efficient. There are a lot of opportunities around ways to enable transparency to expose corrupt leaders and corrupt institutions as well. Another great problem that I think there’s a website or mobile site out there dying to solve is: how do I find a good school for my kid? This is a huge problem throughout the developing world.

At a metalevel, I would just hope that we get more people thinking creatively about this question: What are the scalable technology-based tools that solve problems of the world’s poorest people? All the innovation doesn’t need to happen in Silicon Valley. It’s needed everywhere. I’d really like to see this industry grow bigger. I think if it does, we have a chance to change the world in a big way for the better. TED has done a pretty good job of elevating the stature of some of the folks in the industry, but I’d love to see more of them come out.

There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes?

Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.

It may sound odd but you always have to think about business model and sustainability. If you really want to have an impact, you must think about how you’re going to pay the bills and keep your employees paid. That’s really the cleverness in all of this. How do you take all of this passion to do good in the world, but also apply a lot of business thinking in terms of how to sustain it and how to make it profitable so you can spread it out to more places.

I see a lot of social entrepreneurs not paying nearly enough attention to that when they start out. And then they ultimately fail and shrivel out.

How has TED Fellowship impacted your work?

Probably more than anything, I think it introduced me to a wider set of folks that I think are doing awesome work. The other TEDIndia Fellows are probably 100 of the coolest people that I could have met in India. I made a lot of friends and I feel honored to have met them. As a networking thing it’s above all the rest. I don’t even mean networking for business, but just networking to be inspired by other people. It’s funny, we started a kind of an informal support club for other social entrepreneur CEOs here. It’s fun to have other people that can relate to what you’re going through.

Watch A. Balasubramaniam’s talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 700+ TEDTalks.

Tell us about your water and sanitation organization. What makes it unique?

Arghyam is an Indian charitable institution working on water. It was set up by leading philanthropist Rohini Nilekani, and we began working on water and sanitation issues in 2005. The vision is safe, sustainable water for all. And our goal as a charitable institution is to support initiatives across India that help people get access to water for basic daily needs in a sustainable manner.

So, what’s different about the things we do? First of all, we’re probably the only Indian foundation that exclusively focuses on water and sanitation. The second thing is we do a really wide range of activities. On one side we are a grant-making organization: we give grants to a bunch of NGOs, we support about 80 projects across the country. But we also do our own R&D work. We set up actual research initiatives that we drive ourselves, we conduct surveys and we take up innovative projects in the urban space. So we do a lot of things apart from being a grant-making organization.

And because we’re young and flexible and independent, we have the ability to absorb risk and therefore take up more innovative work in this space. The other thing that’s kind of unique is a bunch of us in the organization come from very different backgrounds. We have people from the IT/tech sector, people from the NGO development space, people from the government sector and people with civil engineering backgrounds, so we have quite a diverse group right there at work. I think all these different perspectives add to our ability to look at problems in a fresh, innovative way.

Tell us about some of Arghyam’s projects.

Arghyam conducted “A Survey on Household Water and Sanitation” (ASHWAS) across 17,200 households in all the districts of rural Karnataka in 2008 and 2009. It is probably the largest ever such a survey done on water and sanitation in India. People from village level institutions and local citizen groups conducted the survey, and we made sure there were 1 or 2 women — at least 50% representation — in each survey team to discuss gender sensitive issues with women. To catch people’s interest, there were activities such as testing water quality and village group walks and mapping of sources and open defecation areas.

Some results were contrary to both existing data and to people’s perception. Water quality was a bigger problem than had been thought, for example, access to water was high, and people’s access to their local government was good.

One of our rural partners are organizing women groups to revive chaals or traditional earthen storage containers for water in Uttarakhand. Another group in Kerala is working to recharge open wells.

How do you decide which projects are most important for you to support?

There are a bunch of principles that are the foundation of most of the things we take up. One is community participation and community empowerment. Another is decentralization — devolving power, functions and funds all to the lowest level of government. Because we believe that in a democracy that’s what should happen, that’s where the service delivery will be most effective.

We believe in approaching water issues in an integrated manner. That means in both urban and rural water, looking at the entire water cycle loop from source to sink. It means managing the water from start to finish, closing that loop.

We also believe in building awareness and capacity, which goes back to building community participation. If you want people to be a part of decision-making in areas that impact them, then you have to start with building awareness and capacities at the lowest levels.

There’s a lot of push for going for large-scale, technology-heavy or engineering-focused big infrastructure projects, so we believe that they should be balanced and the sustainable alternatives — small scale, local, decentralized alternatives — should be explored and promoted.

These are the kinds of principles you would see in pretty much anything that we take up.

You’ve worked in a number of fields in your effort to give back to the world: education, community volunteering, disaster relief. Why is water so important and what led you to dedicate yourself to this issue?

One of the statistics from the government is that 33 million people in India are not officially covered as having access to drinking water. And the government’s definition is fairly broad: access to a source within half a kilometer. And we’re not talking about 24-hour supply of water, and we’re not talking necessarily about good quality water.

Fluoride is a big water quality problem. About 85% of rural India depends on groundwater for their basic domestic needs. And increasingly fluoride and arsenic and nitrates are becoming big water quality problems. More than 66 million people live in fluoride-affected areas. So they’re drinking water with excess fluoride in it.

More than 30 million people live in arsenic-affected areas, and that number is rapidly growing. It used to be in the Bangladesh/West Bengal area, but now it’s creeping into to other parts of India.

In terms of sanitation the coverage is much, much worse. 60% have access to basic sanitation facilities, but the number of people who have to defecate in the open due to lack of usable toilets or due to lack of understanding of how to use or maintain a toilet or the need to use a toilet … the open defecation numbers are much, much higher.

When I moved back to India from the U.S. in 2002, it was primarily to make working on development issues my full-time thing. After a couple of years of volunteering at another organization, Rohini invited me to come on board as the CEO of Arghyam. At that time it was still a generic strategic philanthropy organization. But Rohini literally had one inspirational moment where she said, “Let’s just work on water.” After a decade involved in development issues, this came to her as such a crucial area, and it’s going to become more central as we go forward. It was only after we started going deep into the sector that we realized how critical it really is. Now we’re very happy and convinced that we picked something very important to the country.

What is the biggest obstacle to safe and sustainable water for all?

I would say good governance, because water and sanitation services is the mandate of the government. In India, the state-level government has the responsibility to ensure that all citizens have access to water and sanitation services. A lack of devolution of powers to the lowest levels — either a municipal government in an urban area, or what’s called a gram panchayat in a rural area — the lowest level government doesn’t have the decision making powers or the capacities it needs. The demand in a democracy puts pressure on the elected officials, but the demand is not always strong because of inequities at the lowest level, lack of awareness and lack of education. So broadly, governance, which includes legal issues, institutional issues, platforms for community engagement and awareness issues.

How can a concerned person help?

Just like climate change and other environmental issues, we need to raise the level of awareness. Raise the quality of the debate that’s going on about these issues. Water doesn’t get as much attention as it needs to. Sanitation more so than water, actually. They need to be made much more interesting — I don’t want to use the word “sexy” — but they need to become a lot more catchy and people need to understand the gravity of the situation. As the overall awareness of individuals rises, I think that will lead to better decision making from the people who are in power.

Where can a person go to inform themselves about water issues?

We run something called India Water Portal. We got an invitation from the National Knowledge Commission in India, which was set up by the then-prime minister, and their objective was to see how India as a knowledge economy could use it’s knowledge powers to further develop it. So we started this India Water Portal, and we now run it in two other languages apart from English. We run one specially on sanitation and another one for school teachers and it’s the biggest website in India for water.

What is the good news on water and sanitation?

In India the sanitation coverage I think in the 80s was 2%. So the good news is right there. It’s rapidly gone up.

The drinking water coverage, according to government numbers, is about 95%. It’s very high, the only problem is that water quality problems emerge, which was not even a big issue earlier. Earlier it was just looking at coverage. Now it’s getting more nuanced and we’re looking at improved service and improved quality of water. So there’s been a huge improvement from the last three decades, when the government started giving priority to drinking water and sanitation.

We see enormous hope in so much innovation happening in this space. India is going through a very dynamic phase. We find that people are approaching these issues from so many different perspectives. There are lots of groups of people who are fighting very vocally and who are pushing for reviving traditional systems.

In fact, Anupam Mishra at TEDIndia gave a fantastic talk on the system of desert people in Rajistan. There’s a lot of push in trying to revive traditional wisdom and traditional ways of managing water.

There’s a lot of work going on in empowerment of women. Which goes back to community empowerment and therefore better governance and better services. So there’s a lot of good work happening in self-help groups and microfinance and empowering women and giving them a voice and giving the poor a voice. All of which will lead back to better quality of services at the local level.

There’s a lot of work going on in using communication and technology to drive data-based decision making. Using those tools to improve service delivery mean a lot of exciting things happening in that space.

And then there are areas of decentralized water management. Looking at cutting-edge research coming from the premiere institutes of the country on how do we deal with the waste in a sustainable manner, that doesn’t require heavy, expensive, unsustainable infrastructure.

Because India is forced to innovate in some of these areas, we are able to look at not necessarily going down the path that the developed world has taken, and which now, in retrospect, seems like maybe it wasn’t quite the right thing to do. Big dams are being dismantled and we know that centralized water supply and sewage systems are not necessarily the best way to approach it, in terms of environmental sustainability. Many of India’s innovations in water and sanitation are going to result in solutions that are will show the rest of the world how to go about it.

Siddharth Kara fights bonded labor, forced labor, and human trafficking with what he says are the most effective weapons against them: rigorous scientific research and analysis. Read his interview below to learn why dispassionate study may be the antidote to this inherently emotional issue, and why Siddharth is optimistic about the direction of the anti-slavery movement. Click here to follow his updates on CNN.com as he travels South Asia investigating labor exploitation.

Tell us about your research.

I’ve been researching modern slavery of all kinds for about ten years. I’ve now covered six continents and 18 countries, and I’m writing a series of three books on the subject. I’m putting forth what I think is the first real, strategic, comprehensive, global analysis of the phenomenon. This means not just anecdotes and a superficial or sensationalistic look at slavery, but really trying to dig in to understanding how this is all working in the global economic context, in the global legal context, and what are the various business models of labor exploitation? Are there weak or vulnerable points in those models that may be susceptible to the right kind of tactical policy or legal intervention?

There are three categories of slavery I’ve broadly identified: bonded labor, forced labor, and human trafficking. I’m covering these three subjects somewhat in the three books. The first book [Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery] actually focused on a subset of human trafficking, which is forced prostitution. That came out last year. My next book will focus very much on the bonded labor category. And the third book will kind of cover the rest.

What approach do you take when writing your books?

All three books tend to be based on analysis and reliable data and research. You see, slavery and labor exploitation are inherently sensational to begin with. When you hear stories of men, women, and children being coerced against their will to perform some labor or service, certainly the most extreme cases of that kind of exploitation are already sensational. They’re already shocking to us. And unfortunately, in the ten years that I’ve been doing this research, there’s really been a limited amount of progress in both knowledge and efficacy to fight the phenomenon.

This is primarily a result of the focus on the sensational. People, whether knowingly or unknowingly, leverage that quality of the issue for their own good — be it fundraising for their NGO, selling books and stories, making movies. Whatever taps a human nerve can also be very marketable.

You see a lot of data and information being thrown around — numbers and statistics. But if you ask those people, “Where did that come from?” they can almost never explain it to you. And efforts to galvanize a grassroots global movement of every day citizens to combat the issue have tended to fragment and falter because after that initial wave of agitation and worry learning about slavery creates, without a comprehensive and specific plan driven by good analysis, people lose their interest.

So what I’m trying to do is very much shift the paradigm to focus specifically on starting with the analysis and then saying “What does this tell us? What recommendations can we make that are based on analysis?” It’s fortuitous for me that my background is in economics and law because I think these are the two most important disciplines when it comes to understanding labor and labor exploitation.

Slavery has always been an economic crime. Of course it’s an abhorrent human rights violation. But it’s fundamentally an economic crime: it seeks to maximize profit by minimizing or eliminating the cost of labor. That’s been the formula for millennia. It hasn’t changed from 2,000 – 3,000 years ago or more to today. Now, the modes and means and sophistication and complexity and profitability of that formula have certainly changed. But the formula has remained the same.

You mentioned trying to find and target vulnerabilities in the business models of slavery. Can you talk about what those might be?

Well, it depends very much on which form of slavery you’re talking about, because the business model of various forms of labor exploitation are very different. So, let’s look at the example of sex trafficking. The key thesis that emerged from my analysis is that the enormity and pervasiveness of the global sex trafficking industry and its rapid growth across the last 20 years is driven by its ability to generate immense profit at almost no real risk.

The business opportunity that is presented to the criminal is the following: you can generate tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars per slave, per year, through the exploitation of a trafficked sex slave. The average price it will cost you to purchase or acquire and transport that slave is around $2,000. That’s the immense profit side of that key thesis I articulate.

Then there’s the no real risk side of the thesis. What are the penalties? Slavery is not legal anywhere in the world. But, depending on where you are in the world, the penalty ranges from little to none. There are many countries in which there’s no economic penalty stipulated in the law, or only a very small one. There are countries where there’s a very large economic penalty, but these crimes are almost never prosecuted and convicted. So the real penalty is still basically zip.  There are always provisions for incarceration, but if — and these are big “if’s” — if you get prosecuted, and if you get convicted, jail times are relatively short.

Well, criminals, like the rest of us, are what an economist would call “rational economic agents.” And this is a very compelling economic opportunity. So as long as that reality prevails, individuals — rational economic agents — who lack any moral sensibility will flock to the opportunity of exploiting an individual as a slave in forced prostitution, in this case.

So, now we know how the business works. What’s the actual business model? Well, people are acquired from a certain area through various means — deceit, fraud, coercion and whatnot. They are moved a distance near or far, and then coerced and forced — through violence, threat of violence, torture, starvation, humiliation, and rape — to engage in commercial sexual activity. That’s where the money center is.

Are there vulnerable points in this business model that I very briefly described? Can we intervene at the point of acquisition, movement, or exploitation?

Well, it’s too inexpensive to move people, it’s too easy, they’re almost always using legitimate documents now, so it’s very difficult to identify them, and if you try to cut off one route, well, they’re very practiced at redirecting somewhere else. Borders between countries tend to be porous and unguardable. Movement, I argue, is not the vulnerable section.

What about acquisition? Well, there are 2.5 billion people in poverty, there are 30 million people who are displaced due to war or environmental disaster, there are hundreds of millions of people living in economies that are corroding or societies that are unsafe, corrupt, lawless, etc. Can we solve all those problems and intervene at acquisition? All those problems should be solved, but I don’t think we’re going to solve those in the near future. But this is where NGOs tend to focus. This is what makes obvious sense to anyone. All right, let’s solve poverty. Let’s deal with gender bias. Let’s deal with refugee status and all that, because that’s the low-hanging fruit intellectually.

It’s much harder to analyze the business model of what I’ll get to next, which is the exploitation side. I argue yes, we need to deal with the acquisition, the supply-side forces, but this isn’t going to happen in the near term. Let’s be realists. We’re not going to solve poverty and bias against women tomorrow. Or even 10 years from now. Or even 50 years from now. What does that leave us with? It leaves us with the point of exploitation. Where the actual business is happening. And fortunately, there are vulnerabilities here.

You’ve got brothels, hotels, parlors, street corners, apartments, clubs — these are the typical venues where individuals are exploited in commercial sex. Consumers come to these places in broad daylight — if I can track them down, anyone can — and make the purchases multiple times a day — globally, millions of times a day.

There are vulnerabilities here that can be exploited, in that it’s occurring in relative daylight. It happens millions of times a day. The locations in which it happens are relatively fixed, and you can’t go too far underground because consumers aren’t going to follow you there. And other reasons why this is the vulnerable point, where if you intervene intelligently and carefully, you can not only liberate the slave, which means you also cut off all future cash flows, but you can gather the requisite evidence and information required to successfully prosecute and convict, which elevates the real risk.

So there you are attacking profits and elevating risk, which is inverting that compelling formula we talked about. So this is the argument I make, based on understanding how it works, of what should be done, to more effectively respond.

Now, other forms of slavery will be different: debt bondage in the brick kiln industry, forced labor in child soldiers, etc. Different business models, different economics, and different vulnerable points. Looking at each of them will yield the right response.

You’ve proposed a think tank on labor exploitation. Why is creating a think tank for this issue important?

Because each type of slavery requires a different answer, and because it’s a complex phenomenon that resides at the center of a whole host of issues relating to human rights, to global economics, to law, etc., I’ve argued and suggested that the best way to continue advancing knowledge and effective research and ultimately response to the phenomenon is to create a multidisciplinary think tank of individuals — economists, lawyers, sociologists, law enforcement, human rights, NGOs, etc. — who can bring their respective areas of expertise to this phenomenon to analyze it, and then to create a fully comprehensive suite of research and recommendations on how to respond effectively to each type of slavery in each region around the world.

My suggestion was taken quite seriously by folks at Harvard and the Kennedy School of Government, and we’re setting the think tank up presently. The idea is to set up a multidisciplinary, world-class, Harvard-caliber research program on this issue.

How has TED Fellowship impacted you and your cause?

The TED Conference has helped in that for a couple of conferences in a row, they’ve had someone who’s talked about this issue or known about this issue. If I could offer a subtle critique of the TED Conference, I’d say that they’ve probably focused a bit on the sensational, but that’s important in terms of raising awareness, and that’s what TED talks can do.

But at TED you also have a very invested and captive audience of very intelligent people. Really successful, intelligent people, who I think would certainly appreciate and benefit from more strategic or rigorous analysis and suggestions of what to do.

I had conversations offline with a lot of people at TEDIndia who said, “Boy, we really wish we would have heard from you, because that’s real analysis. That’s a real argument. I know what to do now.” Long before me, though, Ruchira Gupta up in Delhi, who won the Clinton Global Citizen award last year for her work with slave trafficking in India, should be a TED speaker. She’s a remarkable, remarkable woman — brilliant and passionate and intelligent and analytical.

Some of my other Fellows, people who had done very innovative things, created new products, responded to a problem in a new and innovative way. That’s exactly what TED is brilliant at. But they haven’t quite got it right with the human rights side, at least with slavery so far.

How did you get involved with this issue?

I worked at a refugee camp in Yugoslavia as an undergrad. The conditions in the camp were miserable.  I lost 18 pounds and heard countless tales of heartbreaking atrocities, some of which involved Serb soldiers who raided Bosnian villages, executed the men, rounded up the women and female children, and trafficked them to brothels across the region. It took me a few years to process these experiences. I was an investment banker in New York at Merrill Lynch, and then I set that work aside because I had this idea that, “Gosh, this is terrible, all these things are happening but I see very little real, good analysis” — and this was back in 2000, so you can only imagine back then there was really not much going on — “Maybe there’s a way for me to apply my background in a form that would be more useful to someone besides me and myself and my paycheck at Merrill Lynch.”

So I started the campaign of self-funded research around the world. Very tentatively at first just trying to understand what’s going on, and the more I learned, the more people I met at NGOs of which there are obviously many extraordinary ones and people doing tremendous work, and they proved invaluable to me: their knowledge and access to the areas where I just couldn’t have gone otherwise.  The more I learned, the more I realized, “You know, I might be on to something here.”

As I did more and more research and started to speak about what my kind of approach was, it caught the interest of people and politicians and lawmakers and whatnot. I was asked to testify in front of Congress in 2005, so five years after I started. Then I got the offer from Columbia Press for the three books, was asked to sit on a few boards, and really started picking things up in terms of my research and writing. Still of course doing other work on the side because this isn’t my career, but it’s something I’m passionate about.

Besides speaking with police, lawyers, and judges, and confronting traffickers and slave owners, you’ve also interviewed more than 500 slaves. How do you go about doing this?

I’ve never pretended to be interested in buying a slave. In terms of researching sex trafficking I’ve gone into venues and certainly pretended to the proprietor to be interested in a certain type of purchase, but then once speaking to someone, I said, “Look, this is who I am, I’m a researcher, I’d be interested to speak to you, but if you don’t feel comfortable that’s fine, I’ll turn around and walk out.” And nine times out of 10 that’s how it happens. One time out of 10 I have a short conversation, and sometimes a slightly longer one. Most of the long interviews are of course in shelters. And again that’s where NGOs are so invaluable to the kind of work that I and other researchers like Kevin Bales do. You can’t get the kind of information that is needed without those NGOs. But what I’ve really then focused on is understanding the business model and the economics. Because I think that’s where the answer is.

Siddharth Kara interviewing bonded laborers in northern India

But with other types of slavery it’s very different. When you’re researching child labor at carpet looms you’re going into clandestine looms and trying to get information as quickly as you can before the slave owner gets back. You know, people get killed. People have been killed. People I know have been killed doing that kind of work. Or severely injured.

This is such a difficult issue to be immersed in all the time. How do you deal with coming face to face with these horrors?

In the beginning when I started my research, Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves was a real mentor to me, and he’s certainly encountered a lot of slavery in his time as well. And he’s the first one who pointed out after some of my research trips, he said, “You know, you may be suffering from PTSD. I certainly did after some of my research.”

I find that working helps. Like, sitting down and running my numbers. Or writing. Editing, running some numbers in a spreadsheet. Kind of diving into that minutia helps, believe it or not. Using that other side of your brain that doesn’t store all these dark memories and encounters. Other things, simple stuff like going to the movies, I really enjoy SCUBA, so I do that now and then, all the time I can get with my wife. That’s always rejuvenating.

Are there reasons to be optimistic about this issue?

I hope I didn’t sound too critical a note on the current state of the movement and the people involved in it. I do get a little frustrated at times at what appears to be, to me, the focus on sensationalism and careerism and kind of self-perpetuation. But in general there are certainly several exceedingly dedicated, wonderful people who have taught me a lot.

In terms of my own impressions of where this movement is going, it can be sometimes intimidating and a little overwhelming to face these powerful forces of human cruelty, and it’s easy to understand how people who work on this every day get very passionate and angry. And they need that to fuel the work they do and to fight back against these powerful forces.

But I am optimistic that a growing population of informed and dedicated and intelligent activists and thinkers at higher and higher scholarly levels can catalyze a social movement that will make a major dent in this issue. I do sincerely see that starting to happen and have reason for an intense amount of optimism as a result.

Jane Chen has helped develop and market a low-cost device that could save millions of premature babies in the developing world. Read this TED interview to discover Jane’s inspirations, love of music and penchant for making pies. (Watch her talk from TEDIndia 2009.)

Tell us about your work.

I am the co-founder of a non-profit organization called Embrace. We are developing a low-cost infant incubator for use in developing countries. About 20 million low-birth-weight and premature babies are born every year around the world. Four million die annually, and one of the biggest problems these babies face is staying warm, because they don’t have enough fat on their bodies to regulate their body temperature. As a result, many babies die or grow up with severe lifelong health problems.

Temperature regulation is the primary function of a traditional incubator, but incubators can cost up to $20,000. They require a constant supply of electricity, they’re difficult to operate and you’re not going to find them in rural areas where many of these babies are dying.

So as a solution to this problem, my co-founders (Naganand Murty, Linus Liang and Rahul Panicker) and I have been working with an amazing team over the last two years to develop the Embrace Infant Warmer. It incorporates a phase change material — a wax-like substance — into a sleeping bag design. You heat this pouch of phase change material, and then once it’s melted, it’s able to maintain a constant temperature over the next 4 to 6 hours without the use of electricity. You place the pouch of phase change material in the sleeping bag, and it creates a warm microenvironment for the baby. We’ve gotten the cost down to less than one percent of the cost of a traditional incubator, and we’re currently in the process of testing the device. The whole team moved out to Bangalore about a year ago — to India, where I am now.

ABOVE: Baby in an Embrace Infant Warmer

We’re testing at a number of hospitals here, and the first version of the product will be released this fall, in November. This version is intended for small clinics that don’t have any equipment available to take care of babies. It has an electric heater and is suitable for clinics that have intermittent access to electricity.

There’s also a big need for the product as a transport incubator. In India, babies are often born in tiny little clinics and if they have any complications they’re referred to bigger hospitals, and that transport period is the most critical time in the baby’s life — the first few hours after it’s born.

We also have a second version of the product that we’re developing for rural areas — places that don’t have access to electricity at all. That version will be used in the home by a mother, midwife or community healthcare worker.

Read more of this interview with Jane Chen after the jump >>

(Continued)

With such great need in rural areas, why start in clinics?

As we were doing our research, we’d go into villages to talk to mothers and midwives and we would ask, “What would influence you to use this product?” And they would say, “Well, if the village doctor recommended it.” So we’d go to the village doctor and he would say, “If the city doctor recommended it.” So it became clear that there’s a line of influence and that you have to gain traction in the medical community first.

ABOVE: Embrace employees Rahul Panicker and Rajan Patel holding Embrace Infant Warmers

You left your consulting career in Hong Kong to volunteer with children in China orphaned by HIV/AIDS. What started you on your current path?

I think it all goes back to that experience doing HIV/AIDS work in China. That started when I was working as a consultant at Monitor Group in Hong Kong. I started reading a series of articles in the New York Times about the AIDS epidemic in China. In the ’90s, all these poor farmers in China contracted HIV
selling their blood. There was a big, government-run campaign, and they would go to very poor villages, pool people’s blood together, separate the plasma — which is what they needed — and then re-inject every donor with the remaining blood cells, believing that this would allow them to donate again more quickly. So people were donating five or ten times a day, and getting paid five dollars per bag of blood. As a result, in the villages worked in, 60 to 80 percent of the adult population was HIV-positive. That was creating millions of orphans and most of these children did not have HIV, because the parents contracted the disease after they were born.

Reading these stories was shocking and horrifying, and something just clicked. You know, I realized how lucky I am to have been born into the life I’ve been born into. As Warren Buffett always says, we won the genetic lottery. But, I could have easily been born into another life. These people were just trying to make an extra dollar for their families and contracted this horrible disease, they were receiving no help and were left to die in the most horrible way possible. I couldn’t go on without doing something about this. I started volunteering for an organization that was helping to support the children orphaned by AIDS. When I found that I could have an impact and because I was so passionate about what I was doing, I packed up my bags, left my consulting job, and went to work for this organization full time.

In the time that I was there we went from helping 200 to over 3,000 students, and by the end of my time at this organization, the Chinese government, partially as a result of our visibility efforts, stepped up to the plate and agreed to provide free education for all of these orphans.

That experience was my first in the social sector and really opened my eyes to a number of things. First of all, it opened my eyes to the suffering of the world — to the fact that there are huge healthcare disparities between developed and developing countries. In the US, anyone who needs antiretroviral medication can access it, but in the places I was working with in China — and then I later went on to do HIV/AIDS work in Africa — it was impossible to get this medicine. Impossible to access even the most basic medication! So, it became a personal passion of mine to try to bridge that disparity in healthcare and Embrace is a way for me to do that.

That led me to graduate school, and it was at Stanford that I first started Embrace. It was through a class called “Design for Extreme Affordability,” which is half MBAs and half engineers, working together on developing technologies for people living at the bottom of pyramid markets.

The challenge posed to my team at that time was to make a baby incubator that costs less than one percent of the cost of a traditional incubator, which is $20,000. We began doing research first in Nepal, then in India, and realized what was needed was not just a lower-cost version of what exists today, but an entire paradigm shift in the way we’re thinking about this problem. You needed something that could work without electricity, that’s portable and really easy and intuitive to use so that a mother, midwife or really low-trained healthcare worker can operate it. It was based on these factors that we developed Embrace.

We moved to India because it has the largest number of premature babies in the world. Of the 20 million that I mentioned, 40 percent of those babies are born in India alone.

You discovered your passion a bit by chance, reading those newspaper articles. Do you have recommendations for people looking to discover their passion?

It certainly was chance, but one of my favorite quotes is by Louis Pasteur: “Chance favors the prepared mind.” I think that at that point in my life, I liked what I was doing — it was very intellectually challenging — but I knew it was something that I wasn’t passionate about. And I was looking for that thing that would make me wake up every morning really excited to go to my job. Having that in the back of my mind as I read these articles, I knew that that was the path I was going to take.

Another of my favorite quotes is, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

What were you like as a kid?

I was born in Taiwan and moved to the US when I was four. Since I was about seven, I’ve loved cooking. I’d wake up at five in the morning and make cinnamon rolls and all these different things.

My dad, coming from a very traditional family, always wanted me to be a doctor. So he would always ask me, “What are you going to be when you grow up?” And I’d have to say “Dr. Chen.” As I took an interest in cooking, he was so scared that I would want to be a chef, that he banned me from the kitchen [laughs]. He wouldn’t allow me in the kitchen at all.

So you can only imagine my parents’ shock when I told them years later when I decided to quit my cushy consulting job and go do non-profit HIV/AIDS work in China.

What are some of your favorite things to cook?

I love making pies. Apple-lemon pie — that’s my specialty.

I love trying different cuisines all the time. I love baking … I wish I had more time to cook these days. I’m trying to pick up some Indian cooking. But if I had to choose one cuisine to eat every day it would probably be Japanese food.

What else do you do for fun?

I love classical music, and have been playing violin since I was seven. Music helps me to express feelings in a way words often cannot. I love Benjamin Zander’s TEDTalk on classical music.

I’m a big foodie, I do a lot of yoga — I love yoga — I love running … I just enjoy being really active, and traveling.

What social problems are you going to tackle next?

I’m still really passionate about HIV/AIDS and so I’m really interested to do something that can help in this field. I think there are ways to leverage our current technology to help. For example, rapid diagnostic tests need to be kept at certain temperatures. So, is there a way to re-engineer our device so that it can be used to cool rather than warm? I think that would be interesting to look at.

I was recently visiting a hospital in South Africa where 80 percent of the patients are HIV-positive. And of those, 40 percent are co-infected with tuberculosis. Now, tuberculosis is airborne, and because masks are so expensive, there are all these people walking in the tuberculosis ward with no masks on, which is absolutely frightening. So that’s another thing I’m interested in: Can we make a lower-cost or more effective mask that can help with tuberculosis?

There are so many problems out there and as you start doing this work you see more and more things. You want to help everyone. But as I said, we want to stay really focused and make the Infant Warmer a success.

How has the TED Fellowship impacted you?

Work-wise, ever since my TEDTalk was posted, we receive requests all the time from people all over the world wanting to help us in some capacity, whether that be in giving us money or something else.

One guy who saw my TEDTalk pitched the story to National Geographic. Now they’re interested in doing a documentary on Embrace, and he’s actually coming out to India this weekend to start filming. So we’re super excited.

We have polymer experts who want to help us with product design … people all over the world who have offered their help, so that’s been super, super exciting.

On the personal front, TED blew my mind. It was the most amazing conference I’ve ever been to. I was so inspired. I don’t consider myself an emotional person — I must have cried three times the first day [laughs].

Hearing about the different types of work people are doing, I was even further inspired to do what I’m doing now. And I consider it brain candy. I feel like I was really educated and inspired.

Anything else before we finish up?

Everything we do at Embrace is possible because of our amazing board members, volunteers, donors, interns and advisors — particularly the company D2M, which has been so generous in their support in developing innovative technologies as well as sourcing materials.

ABOVE: Happy mom holding her baby in an Infant Warmer

The reason I love working on this effort is not only because we’re providing a simple, low-cost solution to this huge need out there, but beyond that we’re also empowering women to save their children. That really motivates me to do the work day after day, because I meet women in villages all the time who have gone through the suffering of losing their child. And that is the most awful feeling in the world — not being able to save your own baby.

So, I think part of what Embrace is doing is alleviating the pain a family has to go through when it loses a child. That’s something that every parent can relate to, and it’s also empowering mothers to care for their babies.