ENTREPRENEUR/SOCIAL SPECIAL..YOUNG ONES IN RURAL INDIA

CURIOUS CAPITALISTS 

ROLE REVERSAL Young entrepreneurs, driven home by the global economic downturn and encouraged by increased funding for developing areas, are launching for-profit ventures in rural India, transforming towns and villages and changing lives

Last month, a group of 35 people — young brides, wrinkled silvers, homemakers and farmers — braved the searing heat of the Belgaum summer to make their way to a mango tree in the centre of Ashok Nagar, a village of 200 farmer families in north-west Karnataka.

Seeking refuge in the shade, they sat staring at a small grey-and-black stove.

“It consumes less wood and is less smoky,” said Prakash Tirakappanaver, 34, a volunteer with Greenway Grameen Infra (GGI), an 18-month-old company that designs and sells biomass stoves across rural India.

As the demonstration continued, Madhavi Huloli, 35, a cleaner at a government hospital, was surprised to see rice cook in 15 minutes. “My mud stove takes half an hour,” she said.

At the session’s end, when she learnt that a local microfinance agency, part of Greenway Grameen’s distribution network, was offering the  Rs. 1,299 stove in exchange for 25 installments of Rs. 70 per week, she immediately signed up, as did 20 other women from the village.

Huloli has had her ‘stove of happiness’, as she calls it, for three weeks. “It has halved my cooking time,” she says. “I’m never late for work anymore.”

Launched in December 2011, after a year of testing and a pilot project that sought feedback from rural women, the GGI stove emits 70% less smoke and needs minimal adjustment of wood, cow dung or other biofuel. As a result, Huloli finds cooking less time-consuming and less tiring and now even finds time to watch TV or chat with old friends. “Earlier, all I wanted to do after cooking was rest,” she says. “My eyes would burn from the smoke. I couldn’t stop coughing.”

Huloli’s husband Ram, a sugarcane farmer, is happy to shell out the weekly installments. “These days, I feel less guilty when I eat,” he says.

Two 27-year- old engineers, Neha Juneja and Ankit Mathur, are the brains behind GGI. Fresh out of college, the duo set up a consultancy and worked with companies setting up rural electrification projects. They then set up Greenway Grameen Infra, eager to explore the business opportunities they had spotted in rural India — home to 83.3 crore Indians, nearly 75% of the country’s population, according to the latest census figures.

Why stoves? “We realised that many aspects of rural life — mobile phone connectivity, TV, education — had progressed, but cooking remained unchanged and archaic,” says Juneja, the company’s CEO. “Clean cooking solutions do not require hightech interventions but simple, consumer-centric engineering. We took that as a challenge and decided to cater to this growing market.”

The GGI stove is their first product; more are in the pipeline.

This sort of ‘conscious capitalism’ — seeking venture capital to fund a for-profit company that seeks to fill a gap in the growing rural consumer market — is catching on among homebred and home-from abroad entrepreneurs eager to cater to India’s ‘under-served’ rural markets.

Aiding them in this mission is the fact that capital, in the form of grants, microfinance and equity, is now more easily available for ventures that focus on developing areas.

Thus the reverse brain drain caused by the global economic downturn is boosting this growing sector, aided by the fact that international funding agencies such as Development Marketplace (DM; run by the World Bank) and International Finance Corporation are shifting focus from urban centres to underdeveloped, low-income states in India.

In May, for instance, DM awarded a total of $2 million (about Rs. 11 crore) to 20 entrepreneurs based in the low-income states of Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh. “This new set of entrepreneurs is evolving their ideas from a ‘business for good’ paradigm and not a ‘ development of poor’ paradigm,” says Parvathi Menon, managing director of Innovation Alchemy, a Bangalorebased collaboration-consulting firm involved in the scaling up of high-impact business models, especially in rural India. “With greater exposure today, under-served and poor families are also seeking out water, electricity, education and health and are willing to pay for them rather than wait for the government. This marks the emergence of a new market.”

A clutch of lungi- clad, barefoot farmers tread dusty, cracked roads in the harsh May sun. Dented aluminum buckets dangle from their sturdy arms, as they queue outside one of Milk Mantra’s 160 collection points, this one attached to the only kirana store in Jamadharma, a village of 200 farmer families in Orissa’s Puri district.

The 18-month-old dairy start-up sources milk from local farmers, processes it, and then sells it pasteurised or packaged as paneer, under the brand name Milky Moo.

Thrice a month, Milk Mantra tallies the litres brought in by each farmer and pays them, at the rate of

R18 or R20 per litre, depending on the quality of the milk. This is, on average, about R6 more per litre than the rate paid by local dairies and the state milk cooperative.

In all, Milk Mantra buys about 35,000 litres of milk a month from 10,000 farmers across 250 villages in Puri and Jagatsinghpur.

Sarbswar Senapati and his wife Biswajeet are regular suppliers, earning about R4,200 a month for 7 litres a day. “We are old, alone and tired from decades of physical labour,” says Senapati, 68. “My land, which I am too old and ailing to till, one cow and this one-room mud house are all we have. The additional income from the milk is a huge relief to us in our old age.”

A wave of change, one drop at a time

For more than a decade, 35,000 villagers of Mandavgan Farata village in Pune district had no access to clean drinking water.

Their only source was the river Bhima, where the water was contaminated by industrial waste and residue from several sugarcane factories in the neighbourhood.

“The dirty water made even our food smell,” says former sarpanch Seema Datta, 33.

Eighteen years ago, when Datta married and moved here, the situation wasn’t so bad. Over the years, however, it worsened with residue from sugarcane factories and pollutants from a nearby industrial area.

Water sourced and supplied from a neighbouring village by the gram

panchayat was only slightly better. So in April 2010, when Water Life proposed a community water purification plant, the villagers decided to give it a shot.

Two years on, the plant sees 300 villagers queue every day to buy clear, purified water. “The water is crystal clear, like mineral water,” says villager and kirana store owner, Hemant Upadhyay.

The village’s Primary Health Centre’s medical officer, Manjusri Satpute, says two years ago she would treat 15 patients a month for water-borne diseases like hepatitis, cholera, diarrhoea and kidney stones. Of these, at least 10 were children. Today, she says, she sees only about three such cases every month.

Wings on wheels

“TAPPING AND ENABLING rural populations as SMV Wheels is doing will really have a positive impact on their development. MADHUKAR SHUKLA, chairperson of the Fr Arrupe Centre for Ecology & Sustainability at the XLRI School of Business & Human Resources, Jamshedpur
“RICKSHAW PULLERS ARE ONE OF India’s most marginalised communities. I devised a payment model that aims to impact many, and this can only happen via a for-profit venture.”
NAVEEN KRISHNA (RIGHT), founder of SMV Wheels

Pulling his rickshaw through Shivpur’s serpentine lanes, Dharmendra Giri, 28, wears a smile and a sense of pride. Till a year ago, these were rare emotions in his day of drudgery. Giri’s happiness stems from the ownership of his only source of income — a cycle rickshaw. Inscribed on it are the initials SMV, stamped by the company that sold him the rickshaw at 52 installments of R300 per week. In May 2010, a month after the company’s launch, Seth learned of it from a fellow rickshaw puller. Tired of paying a daily rent of R30, he applied. By May 2011, he had his own vehicle.

“Today, I am a proud owner, my own boss,” he says, laughing.

A lot has changed for the Giris since then. Till last year, they lived in a rundown house with a leaking roof. Recently, thanks to an endorsement by SMV, the Giris got free accommodation in a state-sponsored housing complex, Kashiram Awas.

“Today, we eat wholesome meals and even occasionally treat our two daughters to desserts like kheer and jalebi,” says Giri’s wife Reeta.

ELSEWHERE IN THE COUNTRY…

A look at some of the for-profit initiatives among the 31 finalists for the Sankalp Awards 2013, handed out by the Sankalp Forum, a global social enterprise platform that recognises and supports innovative, sustainable, high-impact enterprises

Claro Energy

Based in: New Delhi, with operations in Bihar, Jharkhand, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh

Founded by: Electrical engineers Karthik Wahi, 29, Soumitra Mishra, 38, and Gaurav Kumar, 29

Launched in: January 2011 Manufactures and sells solar-powered water pumps in power-deficient rural areas

Sakhi Unique Rural Enterprise

Based in: Maharashtra

Founded by: NGO executives Prema Gopalan, 58, Upmanyu Patil, 46, and Narhari Rao, 60

Launched in: January

2009

Sources and sells clean-energy products such as biomass stoves, water purifiers and solar products

ERC Eye Care Centre

Based in: Assam Founded by: Eye surgeon Parveez Ubed, 34, and former public relations executive Daniela Gheorghe, 27 Launched in: June 2011 Provides eye care through vision centres and satellite clinics, as well as primary medical services, in semiurban and rural areas

Awaaz De Infosystems

Based in: Gujarat

Founded by: Neil Patel, 31, who has a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, and his PhD guide, Tapan Parikh, 39, assistant professor at UC Berkeley School of Information

Launched in: July 2012 Provides voice-based information services via mobile phone to illiterate farmers and labourers

Barrix Agro Sciences

Based in: Karnataka, with operations across three states

Founded by: Former Ranbaxy executives D Mayil Vaganan, 40, and Lokesh Makam, 36 Launched in: Feb 2012 Sells simple, affordable fly traps that reduce the use of pesticides, increasing farm yields

SMV WHEELS

Sells cycle rickshaws to rickshaw pullers, allowing them to pay in installments of R300 per week

Founded by: Naveen Krishna, 30, former regional centre executive at CAPART, a nodal agency catalysing partnerships between NGOs and the government for sustainable rural development

Launched in: April 2010

A localised white revolution

MILK MANTRA

Sources milk from local farmers, processes it and sells it pasteurised or packaged as paneer

Founded by: Srikumar Misra, 36, former London-based director of mergers and acquisitions for Tata Tea & Tetley Group

Launched in: October 2011

WATER LIFE

Sets up water purification systems and sells treated water across 10 states, at the rate of R5 per 20 litres Founded by: Sudesh Menon, 45, a management graduate and former country head for General Electric in Malaysia

Launched in: January 2009

Humaira Ansari HTBR130609