Coupons and online deals portal PriceBurp.com, owned by Mumbai based Priceburp Media Pvt. Ltd., which recently raised under $100K from Bright Ventures B.V, an early stage Dutch investment company from The Netherlands, has announced its association with Akshaya Patra Foundation which is the world’s largest non-profit organization providing the mid-day meal to 1.4 million children every day. Through this collaboration, the business, while focusing on increasing users, would also simultaneously work to contribute to the underprivileged children with the support of its users.
Speaking about the association, Nirav Dave, Founder & Director of Priceburp said, “What started as a small self soul satisfying activity for me and my team during Diwali of 2014 changed the selfish outlook we had towards life and people around us. We decided to help out a few street children to celebrate Diwali with our savings, however it turned out that even a proper nutritional meal a day was as good as Diwali back at home for these children. Further conversation revealed that they often either begged for food on streets or at times even slept empty stomach. While doing further research on the food and hunger crisis & issues in India, we came across some very grim figures which shocked us. According to UNICEF, 1 in 3 malnourished children in the world, live in India, while another report from Reuter (2012) states that approximately 3000 children die every single day in our country, due to hunger related problems and lack of proper food support. There are many central and state government run programs which support this cause. However for India, hunger still remains a silent mass assassin. This galvanized us into thinking if we could commit ourselves to this cause and further also let our users contribute to this cause and help in feeding thousands of poor children on a daily basis. That’s when we came across Akshaya Patra Foundation and the wonderful job they are doing for this cause.
When asked about how the donation works and what it will help achieve, Nirav stated, “For every user who will now use a coupon from Priceburp for shopping online and getting discounts, we will be donating a meal for the underprivileged children in India through Akshaya Patra Foundation. And the best bit about this plan is that users will not be spending even a single extra rupee, as the donation would be made by Priceburp. And all this while users simply shop online. Which means that each time a meal is donated for a coupon used; we would be taking a small step towards addressing the larger hunger problem in India. While the business will grow, the meals per day offered will also grow leading to a much bigger social cause. With 243 mn internet users in India expected to grow to 500 mn by 2018, India will be one of the biggest Nation with Internet penetration. Out of the 243 mn about 185 mn are mobile internet users. As of today, India’s internet penetration is at about 20% and there is a huge scope of growth for ecommerce as well as supporting businesses. However, the total population that transacts online through shopping is approx 25 mn expected to grow to 40 mn by 2016 and a huge chunk of this population make multiple purchases online throughout the year.
Assuming that 20% of the total population that transacts online uses Priceburp by 2016, and they make average of 5 transactions in a year, we will end up donating 40 mn meals in a year to the underprivileged children. While lots of other sites adopt these initiatives as a part of their CSR activities, we are committed to this cause as a long term initiative and have thus included it in our business strategy.”
Priceburp’s ‘Use a coupon, donate a meal’ initiative for underprivileged children is strategically planned to launch on 14th November, 2014, which is also Children’s Day!
