User:Nishamahadevan/Satish Jha



Satish Jha is an Indian social entrepreneur, who is currently Chairman of OLPC India Foundation. He is a writer, editor, economist, social activist, human rights activist, development professional and a successful information technology and healthcare management professional from India. He has been noted for his work in the area of using information technologies for development and has been a key contributor to this movement. He also chairs the Economic Opportunities Commission of World Information Technology Forum (WITFOR) and several technology for development projects co-founded and supported by him have been awarded or nominated for awards internationally, including tarahaat.com]] (Stockholm Challenge), Desi Power (Development Marketplace), ehealthcare (Stockholm Challenge) among others.

Jha was born in Madhubani, Bihar and raised in Lucknow and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh. he completed is studies in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and later was a Hubert Humphrey Fellow at The Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, a Ford Fellow at the University of Maryland, Netherlands Scholar at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague and studied management at EDHEC in France.

PUCL Bulletin
People's Union of Civil Liberties was born as a major civil rights organization in India in the late 1970s and Satish Jha founded PUCL Bulletin along with Arun Jaitley, editor Neeraja Chowdhary and Smitu Kothari. It became a major voice of civil rights movement in the country at the time.

Janasatta
Satish Jha co-founded Jansatta, a daily national newspaper of the Indian Express Group in 1983 along with Prabhash Joshi, the then resident editor of Indian Express Chandigarh and gave the paper its name, made Janasatta the first Indian national newspaper composed on screen and the newspaper achieved a circulation of 100,000 in six months, a record at the time. Jansatta is published from a number of centers and is known for having given Hindi journalism a language that was different from translatorial tradition that had prevailed in Hindi until then. It was also known for its sharp editorials, language that related both to the common man while raising the bar on elegance.

Dinamaan
He was the fourth editor of newsweekly Dinamaan, a prestigious magazine from The Times of India Group and at the time one of the youngest national editors in India and was known for more than doubling its historic circulation in less than a year. A year after Jha left Dinamaan, it was among the 9 publications closed down by The Times of India Group including Dharmayug, Illustrated Weekly of India, Science Today, Parag, Vama, Sarika among them and that brought the curtain down on a glorious era of Hindi journalism.

Digital Partners
Satish Jha co-founded Digital Partners in India in 2000 and it began an era of social entrepreneurship with new technologies and launched Baramati Conference, started Global Classmates program, seeded SKS Microfinance, aided Drishtee and a couple dozen social enterprises at the time.

Digital Divide and ICT for Development
It was in the late 1990s that he got interested in leveraging his experience as a corporate CIO to explore ways to address the challenges of increasing Digital Divide. Tarahaat.com was one of the earliest such experiments that led the movement to create kiosk based access for the rural poor <7>. He started a social entrepreneurship fund as a co-founder of Digital Partners that seeded SKS Microfinance. He was associated with the co-founding of Baramati Conference on ICT for Development that continues to be a leading event in this space. Following the first Baramati Conference in 2001, Baramati became the first fully wifi town anywhere <12>. He has also been associated with the formation of Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in Ghana <11>

One Laptop per Child in India
Professor Nicholas Negroponte laid out the vision of using emerging technologies of computing and communication to have cell phones like effect on spreading education to alleviate rural poverty. By the time of the World Summit on the Information Society in December 2005, Kofi Annan had displayed Negroponte’s OLPC laptop with a hand crank attached and a new phase in the evolution of computing had begun. However, India did not seem as ready to try One Laptop Per Child as it had been to allow cell phones a decade ago and its education secretary found the pedagogy of learning on laptops suspect. The laptop got into production by the end of 2007. Jha changed the strategy to focus on the state Governments as the Indian Ministry of Education has been engaged with its idea of developing an indigenous $10 laptop that failed to get traction and has now given way to a $35 laptop. Jha questioned that India had no track record of having created any product as yet to come up with anything that belonged to next generation and still offered the Government of India all support in realizing the dream to create a laptop cheaper than OLPC's. Meanwhile several state governments in India, Manipur, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Himachal among them,have endorsed OLPC as their education strategy as the Union Minister has announced that the cheaper laptop will be made available to university students instead of rural schools.