Gururaj Desh Deshpande

Founder

Gururaj Desh Deshpande is the founding trustee of Deshpande Foundation [1], an Indian non-profit working on rural & agriculture, livelihood and education from Hubballi.

Gururaj Deshpande, known as Desh Deshpande, is an Indian-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who founded a series of telecommunications companies in the United States and who, with his wife Jaishree Deshpande, established the Deshpande Foundation. In India the foundation works on rural development in and around Hubballi in northern Karnataka, where Deshpande was born, running programmes in community infrastructure, financial inclusion, natural farming, farm ponds, and forestry and fodder.

The foundation's Indian arm is based on the B.V.B. campus at Vidyanagar in Hubballi and is associated with what it calls the Hubli Sandbox, a regional development experiment, and with the Development Dialogue conference on social entrepreneurship.

Early life and education

Deshpande was born in Hubli, Karnataka; his father was a labour commissioner with the Indian government. He took a BTech in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, a master's degree in electrical engineering at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, and a PhD in data communications at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

Career

Deshpande began his career at Codex Corporation, a Motorola subsidiary in Ontario, before moving to the United States in 1984. He co-founded the router developer Coral Networks, which was sold in 1993, and in 1990 co-founded Cascade Communications, whose equipment carried much of the early internet; Cascade was sold to Ascend Communications for $3.7 billion in 1997.

In 1998 he launched Sycamore Networks in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, with the help of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sycamore went public in October 1999 with a market capitalisation of about $18 billion, and Deshpande appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans in 2000. He has chaired A123Systems, Sycamore Networks, Tejas Networks and Sandstone Capital, and is a life member of the MIT Corporation.

Philanthropy

Deshpande and his wife Jaishree gave $20 million to establish the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT, which funds early-stage research with commercial potential. In 2012 they founded the Dunin-Deshpande Queen's Innovation Centre at Queen's University in Canada.

Through the Deshpande Foundation they support rural development work in northern Karnataka, and they are the foundation's founding trustees. Deshpande was chairman of Akshaya Patra USA from 2008 to 2020.

Recognition

In July 2010 President Barack Obama appointed Deshpande to co-chair the United States National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.[2][3][4]

Deshpande Foundation

The Deshpande Foundation, set up by entrepreneur-philanthropists Gururaj and Jaishree Deshpande, works on rural livelihoods in and around Hubballi, Karnataka — farm ponds, natural farming, financial inclusion, skilling and community infrastructure — with a stated purpose of creating sustainable economic prosperity for rural communities.

Deshpande Foundation reports the following, on its own site: