- Dr Ketan Deshpande’s FUEL has reached over one million young people across India, supporting first-generation learners through education, skills and career guidance.
- FUEL operates across 17+ states, with 2,90,000+ students skilled and 2,900+ scholarships awarded.
- Its Social Stock Exchange listing aims to connect social investment with measurable outcomes and greater accountability.
He was 19 years old when he decided the problem he most wanted to spend his life on was this one: in India, a student’s address determines her destiny more than her intelligence. Dr Ketan Deshpande, an MBA from SCMHRD, Pune, and later a PhD researcher in Corporate Social Responsibility at Symbiosis International University, founded Friends Union for Energising Lives — FUEL — when most of his peers were still deciding what to study. Eighteen years later, in May 2026, he received the Dr BML Munjal Social Impact Award for Outstanding Effort Towards Promoting Education at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. The organisation he built has now reached over one million young people across India.
What FUEL Actually Does for First-Generation Learners
FUEL caters to an audience that most national skilling programs tend to miss: economically weaker-section first-generation learners up to the secondary/higher secondary level, who, without proper career advice, Digital literacy, and application guidance, are unable to leverage their academic performance to secure better livelihoods. To date, they have skilled 2,90,000+ students in both vocational and future-ready skills and awarded 2,900+ scholarships to economically deprived students. FUEL has an operational presence across 17+ states in India and partners with 78+ Corporate & CSR partners, including Capgemini, SBI Foundation, Castrol, BP, Syngenta, Fujitsu, HDFC Bank, United Nations, and more.
The Social Stock Exchange Moment
In a significant move in 2025, FUEL listed on the National Stock Exchange of India’s Social Stock Exchange, one of the first NGOs to take this route. The SSE framework allows FUEL to raise funds from retail and institutional investors against disclosed social outcomes, bringing a layer of market accountability and transparency to civil society fundraising that grant-based funding rarely demands. Alongside the listing, FUEL announced a Social Stock Exchange issue specifically to fund scholarships for underserved girls and first-generation learners. Deshpande has described the mechanism as a ‘structured pathway to align capital with measurable social outcomes’.
A PhD in CSR and what it changed
Deshpande holds a PhD in Corporate Social Responsibility from Symbiosis International University, with research interests including measuring CSR impact, social return on investment, and evidence-based CSR strategies. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a DC Pavate Fellow, and a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge Judge Business School. This educational underpinning of social impact measurement/CSR does not emerge as an accident of FUEL’s design but is also its way of working. FUEL has incorporated third-party monitoring & impact measurement into the design of its programmes from their inception. It has never retrofitted them at the funder’s behest, as evidenced by its 18-year record of creating measurable employability, skilling & career impact for disadvantaged youth, noted in the award citation.
Building Beyond India
In April, Fuel began implementing its model in Africa and Indonesia and has completed projects worldwide valued at over 20 million USD. Former US Consul General David J. Ranz was quoted as saying that the work of FUEL actually proved that there is such a thing as a youth bulge, either creating a demographic divide or a demographic crisis: ‘Youth bulge creates positive dividends if young people are educated, skilled and working productively.’ Fuel has also caught the attention of PM Narendra Modi, who laid the foundation stone for a FUEL Centre of Excellence campus in Bhugaon, Pune, and NITI Aayog awarded Deshpande with a Champions of Change award.
The Way Forward
A million young people across 17 states, reached not by a government department with a national budget but by one man who, at 19, started with a conviction about educational equity and refused to let it become a smaller ambition as he grew older. FUEL’s Social Stock Exchange listing is a specific, concrete action that CSR policy makers should track. If NGOs of this quality and measurable impact can raise verified, outcome-linked capital through the SSE, it creates a market mechanism for directing social investment that is more transparent and more accountable than most existing grant pipelines. The challenge now is making the SSE framework liquid and accessible enough to attract the scale of capital FUEL and hundreds of organisations like it actually need. Dr Ketan Deshpande has built the case with a million lives. The financial system’s job is to meet it.
Clear Cut CSR Desk
New Delhi, UPDATED: September 11, 2026 16:30 IST
Written By: Tanmay J. Urs
