This is inspiration, purified. Pick a root cause of much of India’s beaurocratic and economic pain, and wrap a simple business model around providing a solution to it.
What you get is a company providing anti-corruption services to people experiencing roadblocks in their dealings with bribery ridden government departments. This is gold.
This social enterprise is the brainchild of Shaffi Mather and his partners out of India, and I saw him present their idea at TEDIndia in November this year. Shaffi’s legitimacy in this space includes his qualification as a lawyer, property developer, and founder of 1298 Ambulance, a cross-subsidy model social enterprise successfully making ambulance services available to the people of Mumbai.
He had realised that the cost of providing people with help in tackling bribery, utilising existing Right to Information legislation, was significantly less than the cost of the bribes being requested. Instant business model, with a ready market (~$1 trillion). Just add chutzpah.
Best part is this. On stage, his flippant remark “We could call it something like bribebusters.com…”, led to an email that night by an international paper requesting an interview with him about this “BribeBusters.com” they’d seen mentioned on the twitter backchannel of the TED event. 1. He hadn’t registered the domain name. 2. He didn’t know whether a company with this name already existed. 3. He immediately registered the (surprisingly) vacant domain name once he recovered from his brief panic, fearing a defamation suit from an existing company.
Whether it will be called Stop Bribery and Prevent Corruption, or BribeBusters.com, its a great story. Listen to his talk below.
