If Google hadn’t hired Neha Jain during an on-campus placement drive, she would have been a journalist. The Mumbai-based entrepreneur, who is a journalism graduate from Christ College, Bengaluru, admits that life had other plans. After working in product development and marketing with the tech giant, Jain went on to launch the country’s first, late-night delivery service, Fly By Knight, in Mumbai in 2011. “This was pre-Dunzo and Uber. It was meant to be an on-demand service for anything one needed in the after-hours. But, while we did well, I think it was a little too ahead of its time,” feels Jain, who decided to return to corporate life. It’s then that she got to work on a CSR project, which involved helping a tyre manufacturing company reduce its carbon footprint. “We started mapping all the stakeholders involved in the journey of the tyre from after use to the landfill, and then a recycling centre. During the same research, I was able to understand the problem with recycling plastic as well, and why certain materials got rejected [for recycling].” Jain took this on as a personal project: For eight months, she didn’t let out any flexible plastic—product or packaging made primarily from unmoulded plastic, like plastic bags, films, wraps, pouches or laminates—from her home. “It came to a point where I was running out of space... And back in 2018, barely anyone was taking flexible plastics [for recycling].”

Soni seen conducting geophysical and UAV-based prospecting for groundwater exploration at Banda, Uttar Pradesh