Bijal Damani

Bijal graduated with an MBA and started working as a Marketing Manager. Having experienced the cut-throat dotcom world, she decided to focus on training a generation of future entrepreneurs to adopt sound, ethical business practices. She began her teaching career as a computing instructor, and then spent some time with special needs children. Eventually she became a teacher of commerce and economics, in line with her life goals, for senior students at S N Kansagra School in Rajkot.

Rejecting the typical Indian rote approach to teaching, Bijal includes practical projects in her courses. She has been running the social-entrepreneurship project ‘Galaxy Bazaar’ for nine years now. It consists of organising a bazaar before Diwali as a platform for local artisans and wholesalers, providing all the festival-related goods under one roof at less than retail prices. The net profit the school generates from these events, which has reached an accumulated total of $60,000, is used to offer equal educational opportunities to underprivileged girls. The impact of this project will extend over the next few decades and it has won the People’s Award of the School Enterprise Challenge 2013. Bijal has presented its results and her classroom practices at various international conferences.

She has also launched the project ‘Innovative Product and Marketing Competition’. More than 100 innovative products that address everyday problems have been created by her students in the last five years.