Dhruv Lakra, an alumnus of the Oxford MBA programme and Skoll Scholar, has won a CNN-IBN Young Indian Leader Award for 2011. The award recognises his achievement in setting up a for-profit social enterprise in Mumbai called Mirakle Couriers, which is staffed entirely by deaf people.

To watch a short IBN video about Dhruv's social enterprise, click here.

The idea for Mirakle Couriers came to Dhruv when he received a delivery one day and noticed that the whole exchange was done without a single word being uttered. "If you can get the right address and the package is in the right name, there is no need to speak," he says. "So why couldn't a deaf person do this job?"

Staff at Mirakle Couriers' two Mumbai centres communicate through sign language, which Dhruv himself has learnt and via SMS text messages. "I get thousands of texts a day," says Dhruv. "India has a very competitive telecoms market so every deaf person has a mobile phone. Our company uses texts, for example, to flag up problems like a destination house being closed."

Dhruv had just £300 in his pocket when he left Oxford, and so Mirakle Couriers started small, gaining customer's confidence by initially delivering non-critical mail. Soon clients could see that Dhruv's team were not merely efficient but were going the extra mile with tracking systems and checks that other companies did not prioritise. He now employs 68 people has some major corporate clients including Vodafone.

The biggest satisfaction for Dhruv so far is the confidence his company has built, even beyond his clients. "I'm not a deaf person so to be part of that community is very hard," says Dhruv. "They don't believe in us as there's so much discrimination. It was hard to earn their trust as they think that all normal hearing people will take advantage of them."

Dhruv now wants to replicate Mirakle Couriers' success in other Indian cities. "We are still very young company," he says, "so we've got much more to achieve but we've certainly developed the confidence to do this." And this, in India where only 0.4% of companies employ differently-abled people, is nothing short of a miracle.