SELCO Solar Light Private Limited: A Social Enterprise’s Scaling Up Challenge

Abstract

Launched by Dr Harish Hande in 1995, SELCO Solar Light Private Limited was a Bengaluru, India-based social venture whose mission was to bring solar energy to the bottom-of-the-pyramid customers. In February 2014, the company had weathered a number of challenges in its start-up phase and had succeeded in becoming a profitable venture without veering from its social mission. However, Hande and his team faced a number of challenges in scaling up the business. An early foray into franchising had failed, while a more recent venture to create replicas of the company (called Baby SELCOs) in other parts of India had gotten off to a slow start. Given that nearly 300 million people in India had no access to electricity, SELCO’s decentralized and low-cost model had tremendous opportunities. The inflection point that SELCO faced was in choosing the best way to leverage the immense potential for solar energy in India without compromising its social mission.