We held the the first SIGHT event of the year last month at the DJ Sanghavi College of Engineering in Mumbai. There, 110 enthusiastic IEEE volunteers from Western India heard a keynote by Professor Khanjan Mehta, Director of the Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship Program at the Pennsylvania State University, and a member of the SIGHT Education subcommittee.

In "Engineering for Social Impact," Professor Mehta spoke about his journey and the 10 most important lessons he has learned while running social ventures across the globe. He spoke on how social ventures can be made scalable, sustainable and profitable. He encouraged budding engineers to initiate their own social ventures.

Among his lessons, he said that we should not see people at the bottom of the pyramid as receivers of charity, but as genuine customers for businesses. Social enterprises can very much be profitable.