The Spark Group

The Spark Group is an idea incubator working at the grassroots level in India. Using insights from academic research, the Spark Group develops promising ideas into commercially viable business ventures that deliver services to poor communities.

Management Team

Ayan Sarkar

Ayan is an MBA student at MIT Sloan School of Management and has a B.Tech from IIT Kanpur. He has eight years of experience in working with Fortune 500 companies through McKinsey & Company, Deloitte and Oracle. He recently won the runners up prize at MIT’s 100K Business Plan competition and spent the summer working with Nobel Laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus at Grameen Bank in Dhaka.

Chetan Choudhury

Chetan, a Chartered Accountant and a Bachelor of Commerce from St. Xavier’s College, has more than nine years of experience in accounting, auditing, finance and information systems. He recently moved to India from the US where he used to work with Deloitte Consulting as a management consultant. Chetan also has an MBA and a Masters of Science in Information Management from Arizona State University, USA.

Priya Naik

Priya has graduate degrees in Economics from Yale, in Public Policy from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and in Accounting from the University of Mumbai. She is also a Certified Public Accountant. She has worked at the Poverty Action Lab at MIT, USA, International Finance Corporation (IFC), USA, and Arthur Andersen in India. Along with Ayan, Priya won the runners up prize at MIT’s $100K Business Plan competition and spent the summer working with Nobel Laureate Prof. Muhammad Yunus at Grameen Bank in Dhaka. Recently she helped launch Genesis, a social innovation and entrepreneurship competition at IIT, Chennai in India.

Prathamesh Naik

Prathamesh has an MBA from Cardiff University and a Bachelor of Commerce degree from Narsee Monjee College, Mumbai. He moved to India from the UAE, where he served as the Country Manager for Supermax. Prior to that, he worked with Transmed-P&G for two years.

Anya Gupta

Anya is an MBA student at MIT Sloan School of Management and has a BA in Economics from the University of Virginia. She has five years of experience working with governments in India and the US on infrastructure and logistics planning through Price Waterhouse Coopers, IBM, and the World Bank.

Shivani Garg

Shivani is an MBA student at MIT Sloan School of Management and has B.S. and B.A. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley. She has worked primarily in product management and marketing roles at Microsoft and Sun Microsystems. She also managed and served as board-member of various non-profit organizations for the past 8 years.

Vanya Pasheva

Vanya is an MBA student at MIT Sloan School of Management and has a BA in Economics from Yale University. Prior to business school, she worked at the Centre for Microfinance on a project with SEWA Bank in Gujarat.

Advisors

Sendhil Mullainathan

Sendhil Mullainathan is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant”. His areas of research are corporate finance, development economics, behavioral economics, and labor economics. Dr. Mullainathan received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1998, and taught at MIT for 6 years before joining the Harvard faculty in 2004.

Sandy Pentland

Professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland directs the Human Dynamics research group at the MIT Media Lab. He is a pioneer in wearable computers, health systems, smart environments, and technology for developing countries.

Russell DeLucia

Dr. DeLucia is the President of S3IDF (U.S.) and Chairman of S3IDF (India) and the primary founder of these organizations. Trained in engineering and economics (Ph.D. Harvard University), for more than thirty years he has been a consultant heading teams examining energy, water and other natural resources and related infrastructure development issues. He has advised Governments, firms, financial institutions and NGOs regarding policy and project matters, with experience in more than sixty countries in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Partha S. Ghosh

Partha S. Ghosh is a renowned strategist and an innovator of Business and Economic models. He is the Chairman of Boston Analytics, Access International, and Intersoft K.K based in Tokyo. Mr. Ghosh was a partner at McKinsey & Company and is the founder and Managing Director of strategy and policy advisory firm Partha S Ghosh & Associates.

Karthik Muralidharan

Karthik is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics at Harvard University. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Economics at Harvard University and is also an M.Phil in Economics from Cambridge University, UK.

K. Satyanarayan

K. Satyanarayan (Satya) received an M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Chennai and an M.S. from Cornell University, USA. Satya was a founder director of the Indian subsidiary of Cricinfo. Apart from publishing and media, Satya’s interests include education and entrepreneurship – especially in small businesses, politics and public policy. Satya is a Director on the Board of New Horizon Media Private Limited