Santosh Kumar Choubey

A visionary social entrepreneur working tirelessly for over three decades, to transform millions of lives in rural, tribal and semiurban India by providing vocational skills and entrepreneurship opportunities. He evolved the model of Multipurpose ICT Centres for social entrepreneurship in India. He forfeited coveted jobs like Indian Civil Services and Indian Engineering Services to establish the AISECT network in 1985 aiming to bridge digital, gender and language divide between urban and rural India. Without waiting for Government or donor funds, he adopted innovative tools to empower entrepreneurs especially women. AISECT imparts vocational education and entrepreneurship training through its over 20000 centres across 31 States and UTs covering 400 districts and 8000 villages in India. It has skilled 1.7 million so far and offers citizen centric G2C, B2C services through aisectonline.com. Women Entrepreneurship and skill development, specially for the underprivileged has been in focus of all his societal and professional efforts since inception of AISECT. He is the recipient of Schwab Foundation Award, Ashoka Fellowship and National Innovation Award for Social Entrepreneurship among others.