Our Board of Advisors are leading digital inclusion advocates, technocrats and philanthropists who are passionate about eGramserve’s model of using IT-based jobs to bring the youth in remote areas in the pool of the nation’s productive workforce.
The Advisory Board consists of the following members:
Osama Manzar
Osama is a convert social entrepreneur spearheading the mission to overcome the information barrier between India’s rural sector, and the so-called developed society, through Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF), a not-for-profit foundation that he founded to accomplish this goal. He is also Chairman of the Manthan Award South Asia for Digital Inclusion for Development, Member of the Task Force on Growth of IT, ITES & Electronics HW Manufacturing Industry and Member of the Working Group e-Governance, Ministry of Comm. & IT, Government of India. He recently initiated the mBillionth Award South Asia Award that recognizes and mentors start-ups providing mobile content & applications that can improve lives and empower people at the base of the economic pyramid in the region. Osama has authored titles like “Development & Digital Inclusion – Cases from India & South Asia”, “e-Content: Voices from the Ground” and “Internet Economy of India”. He is also e-Content Expert for India for World Summit Award, and has been Jury Anchor for the Dataquest e-Gov Champion Award and e-Content & ICTD Award for Bahrain, Sri Lanka & Bangladesh.
Osama is a physics graduate and post graduate diploma in Journalism. He was awarded a joint Chevening/Young Indian IT Professional Program 2002 Scholarship by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
Rajnesh D. Singh
Rajnesh is a Fiji-born entrepreneur and engineer of Indian descent. He holds several positions in the regional and international ICT community including the Internet Society and IPv6 Forum, and is an active Internet advocate and speaker on Internet technologies. He has founded several successful companies in the technology space and in real estate in the Asia Pacific region. He has held executive management roles in multiple companies, and has consulted on communications & power infrastructure, project management and business strategy for medium to large companies and organisations in the region. He has also held advisory roles across multiple sectors ranging from governmental organisations to sporting organisations and the private sector.
Rajnesh has worked extensively with the A-Pac Internet community, and was the founding Chair of ICANN’s Asia Pacific Regional At-Large Organisation (APRALO), Chair of the Pacific Islands Chapter, ISOC and the IPv6 Forum. He has worked extensively on ICT policy, training and capacity building in the region, including delivering programmes for UN agencies. His current areas of interest are ICT Policy in Developing and Emerging Economies, Internet evolution, and Effective Business Strategies for Developing Markets. Rajnesh speaks multiple languages and has a strong interest in sports.
Satish Girotra
Mr. Girotra is a seasoned technocrat and has been involved in developmental activities as the Advisor to the Govt. of Haryana for the World Bank funded DPEP and Chief Consultant to EdCIL, a Govt of India Undertaking and oversees the implementation of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) program across all the states. In his roles at the SSA- Haryana and later in EdCIL, he won widespread recognition from the Ministry of Education for his innovative and cost effective implementation of building government funded schools, which enabled the state governments to build more schools in the same budget, without compromising on the quality of construction. In his early youth, after completing his Civil Engineering degree from Roorkee University (Now I.I.T Roorkee), Satish had drafted himself in the Indian Army’s Corp of Engineers and has fought two wars with Pakistan being on the frontline with the fighting Corps in both occasions. Today as a retired technocrat & advisor he shares with our team many inspiring and awesome first-hand stories of dog-fights and tank battles fought in the yesteryears which makes our problems look miniscule give us the will to overcome!
Dr. Beena Upadhyay
In her early years, Beena’s family had migrated to Delhi from the Almora district of Uttarakhand. After doing her MBBS & MD in Gynaecology from the prestigious Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi (popularly known as MAMC), she refused plum postings in the top private hospitals on India to serve the poor in a government hospital in old Delhi area – the Govind Ballabh Pant Hospital. The Department of Gynaecology in which she was posted here had majority of their women patients the walled areas of nearby old Delhi, from conservative & downtrodden backgrounds mostly from the Muslim minority population that inhabits that area. She served 10 years of her prime working life relentlessly promoting hygiene, women empowerment and family planning practices to these women who came to be treated at the hospital. Later after having her daughter, she moved on to private practice and is now a Consultant at the Artemis Hospital in Gurgaon in Delhi NCR.