Mr. Anuj Sharma is a social entrepreneur and a development practitioner. Over the past 18 years, he has been engaged in Designing and Scaling up of low-cost, high-impact, large-scale, sustainable solutions for the underserved communities across India. Since 2009, first as COO and then as CEO at Piramal Sarvajal, he has spearheaded the evolution and implementation of decentralised business models for providing safe drinking water to villages, schools, slums and public places, reaching out to 768,000+ people daily across 1800+ locations.
Before joining Piramal Sarvajal, as part of national leadership team of Pratham India, a non-profit educational institution, he built and led the Rajasthan chapter of Pratham. There he led Read Rajasthan campaign, reaching out to over 1.7m students across 40,000 government schools, mobilizing 20000 plus volunteers with a team of 300 people. He has been a member of several government and public– private partnership committees and consultation, contributing to designing and scaling up of effective last mile solutions in education and water domain.
Mr. Anuj has been a speaker at various international events like “Social Innovation in Action” organized by The Economist, South Asia and Annual National Convention of the UN -Global Compact Network India (GCNI), forums like, Lend for Change: India Water Credit Forum, Financing Urban WASH, USI Nepal, GIPC event at WTO Geneva etc. to share learnings and insights gained from working with communities, government agencies while developing decentralized solutions and leveraging technology.
He has frequently been a guest faculty on social entrepreneurship and development management at leading Indian management institutes, including the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), Institute Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), CEPT and the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India (EDII).
A textile engineer by training, he holds a PGDRM from the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA), an Amul-Tata scholar. He is a fellow of Santa Clara University’s Global Social Business Incubator (GSBI) programme, he has also been recognised twice in a row as one of India’s most talented Rural Marketing Professionals by CMO Asia, in 2014 and 2015.
Mr. Anuj has successfully completed ASCEND – An inhouse Leadership Development Programme at Piramal group, Harvard run Strategic Non-Profit Management, India (SNMI) programme at Ashoka University and Nordic Masterclass @ Copenhagen. Work under his leadership has been extensively covered by Tv channels ranging from BBC, NHK, Al Jazeera to NDTV and CNN IBN and has also been featured in print media ranging from WIPO, to Business World to Mint and The Hindu. Piramal Sarvajal not only has two US patents it has also been awarded ‘Transformational Technology award by Financial Times and International Finance Corporation (IFC).
