Jaishree Deshpande

Founder

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

Jaishree Deshpande is an Indian-American philanthropist who co-founded the Deshpande Foundation with her husband, the technology entrepreneur Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande. The foundation, established in 1996, supports social entrepreneurship and development programmes in India, the United States and Canada.

In India the foundation's principal base is at Hubballi in northern Karnataka, where the Deshpandes set up the Hubli Sandbox in 2008, a programme intended to help local entrepreneurs build enterprises with social and economic impact.

Early life and education

Born Jaishree Kulkarni, she comes from Hubli in northern Karnataka. She studied physics at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and later studied computer science in Canada, where she became a member of faculty.

Career

After completing her studies at IIT Madras she worked as a scientist with the National Aerospace Laboratories and the Indian Space Research Organisation before moving to Canada.

With her husband she founded the Deshpande Foundation in 1996 to support the creation of enterprises with social and economic impact. Its work includes the Deshpande Foundation India and the Deshpande Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Hubli, Entrepreneurship for All in the United States, the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation in Boston, the Gopalakrishnan Deshpande Centre at IIT Madras, the Dunin-Deshpande Queen's Innovation Centre at Queen's University and the Pond-Deshpande Centre at the University of New Brunswick.

The Deshpandes have also endowed facilities at IIT Madras, including the Sharavati hostel and the Deshpande Centre for Optical Networks. She is a mountaineer and has trekked to Everest Base Camp, Mount Kailash and Gosaikunda, and at the age of 70 to Gaumukh-Tapovan in the Himalayas.

Recognition

She received the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.[2][3][4][5]

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: