Harish Hande co-founded Selco India to eradicate poverty by promoting sustainable technologies in rural India. Since 1995, Selco has built a service network of 28 branches in Karnataka and Gujarat, with 180 employees catering to more than 500,000 customers in rural and urban areas. Harish has received several awards and recognitions for his work, including Asia's prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award, sometimes referred to as Asia's Nobel Prize, for his pragmatic efforts to put solar power technology in the hands of the poor through social enterprise. Harish holds an undergraduate engineering degree from IIT Kharagpur and a Ph.D. in energy engineering from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.