In a first, the Prestigious Rajyotsava Award has been conferred to a digital platform – The Better India

Bangalore

India’s first and Asia’s largest online community to drive change has been honoured with the Rajyotsava Award, one of the highest civilian honours of the Karnataka state.

This award, presented by the Chief Minister of Karnataka, is being conferred to The Better India for its contribution towards the progress of the state. For the first time in its history, this award is being conferred to a digital platform for state-wide, on-ground progress. Since 2008, The Better India has told stories of change, innovation, and heroics of ordinary citizens inspiring millions of readers into action!

With an active community of over 90 Million readers across the country, their stories have brought light to villages that never had electricity and water to those that were dry. They brought cutting-edge learning technologies to rural classrooms, helped children from underprivileged backgrounds access higher education, influenced state-level policies around waste-management and enabled women from marginalised communities earn sustainable livelihoods.

“The whole team was overjoyed to receive this award, and it’s especially great to hear that we’re the first digital platform to be given this honour. Through the past decade and all our work, the one vision that drives us is creating large scale positive impact, and this award is a great validation of our efforts. This goes out to our tight-knit community of readers, writers, supporters and of course our greatest inspiration – everyday citizens and change-makers without whom we’d have nothing to write about”, say Dhimant and Anuradha Parekh, founders of The Better India and The Better Home.

Buoyed by interest from the community and the momentum of their movement towards social and environmental impact, the platform launched The Better Home, India’s first sustainability-focused direct-to-customer subscription home care brand, earlier this year that now ships to nearly 400 cities across the country, saving over 100 million litres of harmful contaminated water from our water bodies in just six months!