Bhubaneswar, Jan. 9: Two ventures from the state have been shortlisted for a social enterprise challenge, jointly organised by the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIM-C) and the Tata group to find the country's most promising early-stage social enterprises.

The challenge aims to create an ecosystem for social entrepreneurship and encourage sustainable, scalable and measurable social impact. Every year, from hundreds of impact proposals spread across the sectors, 20 teams are selected for semi-finals, based on their business model, social impact and sustainability..

"We are looking for social enterprises who are ready to scale up and create impact at the national level. There are funding opportunities for deserving participants," said IIM-C Innovation Park director Ashok Banerjee.

The Smart Kisan project, one of the ventures picked from Odisha, is an agri-tech social enterprise for promoting technology-enabled rural collectives to address the problems of small and marginal farmers in rural India.

The centre works in Odisha and Uttar Pradesh and is equipped with mobile technology that provides information on market price, scientific decision-making tool for seeds, fertiliser and pesticide purchase. Smart Kisan aims to build a strong network of more than 1,500 rural collectives and reach out to more than 3 lakh farmers across the country. It wants to build a transparent market linkage channel through which farmers will get information about their transactions in the local language. The intervention addresses three issues - getting higher market price, access to quality input product and scientific cultivation practices.

Fresh Chick. The initiative has helped bring to the limelight social entrepreneurs, as well as, with expert partners, provided social start-ups an ecosystem and mentoring about business techniques and private sector approaches to find solutions to social, cultural or environmental problems," said Tata Services vice-president (corporate affairs) Atul Agrawal said.