Ashish Karamchandani – Executive Director, Monitor Deloitte in India

Ashish Karamchandani is an Executive Director at Monitor Deloitte India, based in the Mumbai office. He is the Founder of Monitor Inclusive Markets (MIM), a dedicated unit within Monitor Deloitte, that focuses on catalyzing market-based approaches to improve the lives and livelihoods of the global poor – working both at a broad sector level (developing a more rigorous underpinning of the opportunity, its drivers and barriers and how to address the barriers), and at the level of specific initiatives. He has co-led a foundational field based project across sectors like healthcare, water, education, livelihoods etc., and surveyed over 300 social enterprises to identify business models that have been successful at serving lower income segments.

One of the specific initiatives Ashish is extensively involved in is low income housing, an area in which the Inclusive Markets group has been working to ‘make the market’ at an ecosystem level for the past six years. Today developers like Mahindra and Foliage and new players like Jerry Rao are building houses with prices as low as Rs 5 and 6 lakhs and entrepreneurs like Rajnish Dhall and established players like Muthoot Pappachan Group are financing informal sector low income customers. Over 40 developers have placed more than 50 thousand houses on sale, and 10 housing finance companies are serving such low income households. A market of over 1,100,000 crores is on its way to scale.

Ashish has been with Monitor for 19 years, starting off at their Headquarters in Cambridge for 5 years and then leading Monitor’s consulting business in India till 2005. Ashish has a B.Tech from IIT, Bombay, a M.S. from Berkeley and a PhD. from Stanford University. Ashish, with his wife Vibha Krishnamurthy, also runs Ummeed, a non-profit organization for children with developmental disabilities.