No Poverty

Applied inquiry complements this research. Through PGP immersions, students investigate rural markets, livelihoods, public systems and local enterprise. Entrepreneurship programmes and community projects provide further settings for studying income generation and market access. Field inquiry informs student projects and supports the development of teaching cases and future research. It gives students a practical understanding of the constraints facing producers, small businesses and communities.

Making opportunity more accessible

Economic mobility begins with the ability to enter and remain in education. Masters’ Union therefore combines scholarships with wider financial and student support rather than treating tuition assistance as the only barrier to participation. Across three identified need-based and diversity routes, 154 low-income students in the 2025 batches received financial aid. These scholarships cover both postgraduate and undergraduate programmes. This included 117 students supported through the undergraduate Need-Based Scholarship, 32 through the Narendra Jadhav Diversity Scholarship and five through the Chairman's Diversity Scholarship. The wider scholarship portfolio also supports women, entrepreneurs, students from underserved regions and communities, young leaders and candidates experiencing financial hardship. Support continues beyond admission. Education-loan assistance helps students finance programme and hostel costs, while accommodation, meal support, emergency assistance, mentoring and counselling can help address some of the pressures that affect a student's ability to continue through university.

Financial runway for founders

The same principle carries into entrepreneurship. A promising venture can fail before it has had time to prove itself simply because its founder lacks financial runway, mentorship or access to the right network. For Masters’ Union student founders, the Venture Initiation Programme and Masters’ Union ventures provide a combination of grants, incubation and founder support.

Up to 2025, Masters’ Union has provided ₹1.36 crore in venture grants and approximately 4,500 hours of one-to-one mentoring. Across the wider entrepreneurship portfolio, more than 30 ventures built and launched have created over 500 jobs. The Founders’ Fellowship provides selected full-time founders with ₹50,000 per month for up to one year, reducing immediate financial pressure while they build. Together, these measures address different points at which financial constraints can restrict opportunity, from entering university to attempting a first venture.

Student consulting for local enterprises

Through live consulting projects, Masters’ Union students work with smaller businesses on billing, delivery-platform economics, customer discovery, online visibility and operating efficiency. Projects have introduced point-of-sale systems, WhatsApp ordering, improved digital listings and clearer operating processes, connecting management learning with the needs of local enterprises. A similar idea underpins work with artisans and producers. Through the Kalaghar initiative, students worked on the commercialisation of handcrafted products made by artisans from underserved communities, helping connect production with marketing and customer access. Farmer-facing initiatives have likewise created opportunities for smaller producers to interact directly with the campus community. Students in food ventures also work directly with farmers, food producers and manufacturers to source their products and ensure quality. Buying directly from producers gives them a direct market, which supports farmers’ livelihoods.

Donation drives and community support

Not every intervention is about enterprise creation. Economic vulnerability can also create immediate barriers to food, mobility, education and basic resources. Through community partnerships and the student-led SEWA Club, Masters’ Union has supported these needs alongside its longer-term livelihood work.

The Sharing the Light campaign, for example, raised INR 50,000 from alumni, employees and the institution and supported visually impaired communities through the distribution of 42 walking canes, 43 headphones, 81 Braille slates and food packages. Another engagement with the Robin Hood Army supported more than 250 residents of Ghata Village. Taken together, these activities connect two dimensions of poverty reduction: addressing immediate constraints where necessary while creating longer-term pathways towards income, enterprise and participation.

Learning how livelihoods and businesses are built

At Masters’ Union, economic mobility is not treated only as a policy question. Students experience the mechanisms behind it by building businesses, working with entrepreneurs and studying livelihoods in the environments where they exist. The OutClass model places students in situations where economic decisions have real consequences. Through the Dropshipping Challenge, students identify products, work with suppliers, set prices, acquire customers and manage sales and fulfilment. Since its inception, the challenge has engaged more than 500 students, supported over 150 student businesses and generated more than INR 10 crore in cumulative revenue.

The importance of the exercise is not simply that students generate sales. They learn how a relatively low-capital business is created from the ground up and develop practical capabilities in digital commerce, marketing, supplier management, pricing and customer acquisition. These skills can translate into entrepreneurship, independent work, employment or the growth of an existing family business.

Students who want to take an idea further can progress through the Venture Initiation Programme, moving from problem validation and a minimum viable product to go-to-market execution and product-market fit. The pathway connects founders with experienced entrepreneurs, investors, CXOs and domain specialists, culminating in opportunities to present ventures to more than 150 venture capitalists and angel investors. The institution also takes students outside conventional corporate settings to understand how livelihoods are created across India.

Through PGP immersions, students encounter rural communities, informal businesses, cooperatives, agricultural enterprises and artisan networks. A Swades Foundation immersion exposes students to integrated rural development across livelihoods, health, water and education. In Dharavi, they examine informal enterprises and recycling economies. At Amul in Anand, they study how a farmer-owned cooperative connects producers with markets and distributes economic value. In Lucknow, engagement with SEWA's Chikankari collective provides a view into women-led artisan livelihoods and collective enterprise. These experiences give students a broader understanding of poverty and economic mobility. They see that livelihoods can be created through a technology startup, a local restaurant, a farmer-owned cooperative, an artisan collective or an informal enterprise, and that the barriers facing each are different.