CHENNAI: Starting mid-March, Indian Institute of Technology - Madras (IIT-M) students who want to serve the poor can get help for realizing their ideas. To channelize student interest toward social entrepreneurship, IIT-M has started the Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship (CSIE), which will focus on education and research related to social entrepreneurship. 

Alumni and professor at the department of chemical engineering at IIT Madras R Nagarajan, who is a member of the centre\'s steering committee, recalled that when he passed out in 1981 none of the students wanted to become entrepreneurs. But now 10% of a graduating class wants to have their own startups. "So we felt the need for a center on campus to nurture them in this direction." IIT-M faculty said that the success of the Centre for Innovation where one could walk in with an idea and walk out with a prototype, prompted the institute to start the CSIE. The institute already has a minor course on the idea of social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Besides courses, the center will recruit postgraduate students to pursue MS or Ph D in social entrepreneurship, provide field training to students in the field, and come up with fellowships and summer internships. To generate interest among the faculty, the centre will offer a sabbatical from work to engage them in full time research. It will also develop a database of socially relevant technologies developed by the IITs and other academic institutions, and establish links with other academic initiatives in social entrepreneurship. The centre will also provide design; development and validation support as part of the incubation process, which will be done by Villgro, a social enterprise incubator under IIT Madras. To ensure that such entrepreneurial ideas are scaleable and sustainable in the long run, Villgro has called for research proposals on how to ensure the success of ventures that will reach millions of Indians who live on Rs 2 a day. 

Paul Basil, founder of Villgro, said that in 2005-06, around 40% of graduating students said they could not become entrepreneurs because they had taken educational loans that they had to pay off. In 2008-09 students were wary of social entrepreneurship because they didn\'t know what it was. There was no documentation to look back on and learn from. "No books and no literature in the form of journals with the Indian perspective," he added. The three-year project, which will address that problem, will receive $ 565,000 Canadian from the International Development Research Centre in Canada.