Moved to Rural Track

Dear Readers,

This blog has been moved to a new domain http://www.ruraltrack.com/
All the old posts are available and also with some new and thought provoking articles.

Do leave your comments on the new website http://www.ruraltrack.com/

Nischala

Book Review: Stay Hungry Stay Foolish

In the Indian entrepreneurial scenario, IIMs always play a strong role in connecting various groups in the entrepreneurial ecosytem. It sometimes builds a platform for entrepreneurs to showcase their b-plans and sometimes organizes events for like minded people to meet, grow and establish as entrepreneurs.

Where is all this going to....it is leading to a book called "Stay Hungry Stay Foolish" written by Rashmi Bansal, an IIM-A alumni. She has taken time off and scripted this book with a lot of valuable inputs from different entrepreneurs (commanality is all the entrepreneurs belong to IIM-A alumni). It is a compendium of certainly 25 inspiring stories of entrepreneurs. It is not just their entrepreneurial journey but also what are their learnings out of it and what do they have to give as a lesson of the day for their fellow entrepreneurs. The layout is interesting and leaves a message behind for the reader.

Uh! this must be one of the articles on my blog which has the word "entrepreneur" repeated the maximum number of times. That is because the book is all about ENTREPRENEURSHIP.

I strongly recommend this book for people of all ages but, the most important thing they should have to read this book is "entrepreneurial spirit".

NREGA – NATIONAL RURAL EMPLOYMENT GUARANTEE ACT

What is the buzz about it after four years? Is it really one of the successful Acts passed by the Government? Has it truly worked for the rural folks and the farmers? Has it accomplished to alleviate poverty?

Among the slew of policies introduced by the government to stimulate employment and create sustainable livelihoods; NREGA is one of them. There is a surge in the discussions, articles published and debates reviewing the success of this Act, after lapse of four years of its passing in the Parliament.

Introduction:

The Minister of Rural Development, Sri, C.P. Joshi during the 2005 term of the UPA government, under the aegis of Ministry of Rural Development passed the bill in the Parliament creating the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) and raising a hope of continuous employment all over India (especially in the rural). Since then people have looked forward for the benefits of this legislative move.

It emerged out of the memorandum of recommendations submitted by the members of Wada Na Todo Abhiyan to the Ministry of Rural Development. This was primarily implemented to bring in transparency in the wealth distribution system executed by various government policies.

The primary objectives are as follows (Source: Ministry of Rural Development):

Enhance livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household whose adult members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.

A question would arise whether there is no other policy that has been introduced in the past which focuses on this objective. The answer is “Yes, there have been many steps taken in the past to create perpetual opportunities for employment in the rural. This Act is unique because, the objectives also added the term transparency which is hidden in the not so called bureaucratic mannerisms of the men-in-charge.

This step taken by the Government has been appreciated by many critics. From a perspective to understand this subject better I have consolidated a few instances and experiences of the farmers to showcase the advantages of the Act and in how many ways it has backfired.

NREGA, at the union level has insisted on employing all the people willing to work for daily wages, especially for the manual work. Farmers of all classes of society looked for transparency and accountability provisions as community work and consolidated land development was replaced by the individual land holdings.

UPA Government also claims that this scheme provides employment for 100 days for a particular salary irrespective of which social class one belongs to.

No matter how much the term “transparency” has been glorified, we have instances like the social audit at Bhilwara proving the failure of this scheme. Thanks to NGOs which participated in this audit, tracing a mis-match in the accounts amounting over 1 crore rupees. Many other village administrators belonging to Rajasthan were questioned in this matter.

NREGA has not been a complete failure but, has kept up to the expectations when we hear the success story of Parsa Par gram panchayat. Reports claim that in this project over 13,000 people were provided employment.

We have to wait and see how far this Scheme will help in alleviating poverty and making Vision 2020 a reality.

http://www.rural.nic.in/publication/April2008/gb_eng_april08.pdf

http://southasia.oneworld.net/Article/nrega-must-create-sustainable-livelihood-say-indian-experts

http://www.indg.in/rural-energy/rural-energy-home-page/view?set_language=en


http://www.livemint.com/2009/06/14173727/India-to-pitch-for-policies-to.html

Transparency http://www.livemint.com/2009/08/17214837/Transparency-is-one-of-the-mos.html

Book Review: A Better India A Better World

Good foundation, value-based system, good management and entrepreneurship are the elements dealt in this book. This is a must read for all entrepreneurs (be it a well-established entrepreneur or not). I am not saying this because it is written by a successful entrepreneur, Mr.Narayana Murthy but, because it contains the right ingredients for an entrepreneur to build his/her business. The book has chapters arranged in a perfect order and gives content feeling at the end of the book. Following is the order:

Address to Students
Values
Important National Issues
Education
Leadership Challenges
Corporate and Public Governance
Corporate Social Responsibility and Philanthropy
Entrepreneurship
Globalization
Infosys


My favourite topics are: the sub - chapter Compassionate Capitalism, all chapters of Education and Values.

Typically entrepreneurs brag about their company and the road they have taken, it is more about their own story. This book is not about Infosys, it is about building a value based enterprise. Infact you will see only two chapters speaking about Infosys towards the end.

This is a compendium of the speeches delivered by Mr.Narayana Murthy and to me they are more than just facts. The speeches and filled with words of wisdom.

In short the book moves us to the next level of revelation....as an entrepreneur.

Gaming Industry moving to retail mechanism

Gaming industry is a matured sector in the developed economies but, what India have say about it.

Sector Overview:

The retail gaming industry is segregated into mom and pop outlets and large format outlets. Gaming, is a crucial sector in the entertainment industry sizing upto and $48 billion globally. Of this the console and PC gaming contribute to 50% of its size and this gives us an estimate of how big the retail gaming market will grow into.

What do the players say about it?

Tha major and prominent players in this sector in India are Zapak, 7seas, Games2win, et al.
Zapak, Reliance's big entertainment online gaming arm has a positive feel about the growth of the sector. It has seen outstanding sales numbers in retail gaming through its gaming CDs. The number was about 200,000 units in 6 months. They are moving ahead by launcing 25 more titles.
7seas have also experienced a positive outcome out of the retail gaming sales. They agree with the idea that this industr provides quick returns in 6 to 12 months of time.

The related allies to this industry in India like the distributors of CDs and other publishers believe that this industry has a great growth potential in the coming years. Milestone Interactive which is one such distributor has an offering over 200 console games and about 60 titles in its portfolio. This industry has estimates of 20,000 console owners joining the community every month which would ripple down to lower price bands and more consumers.

Limitations:

With all the optimism this industry has a threat of piracy. Moreover, few players like Games2win have a sense that this is not all that lucrative as it looks as it needs huge capital (~$20 million) to sustain and pull up in this market.

Observation:

Retail gaming industry is going through a phase resembling the DVD rental market in India, though it has some more alarming factors to watch out for in the India economy like lack of computer education, low internet penetration and having crazy consumers as it is case for movies (DVD Rental).

First online microfinance platform

I stumbled over an interesting student start up called KIVA.
This is a person-to-person micro lending online platform.
It has created great transperancy for the lenders to choose whom they wish to lend money. The website provides list of entrepreneurs all over the world, description of their business and loan amount they need.
Once the loan is made the lender can track the progress of the entrepreneur. He will receive his money back over time and can re-lend to the entrepreneurs on the website.

This starts from a small amount of $25 (~Rs.1000). Each $25 goes to a larger loan which helps the entrepreneurs in the developing economies to grow and establish their businesses. All the money crunch a developing economy experiences will be wiped out with this concept. It is very exciting for the entrepreneurs as well as the lenders.

REAL INDIA

“Real India lives in the villages”, this was quoted by the first Indian Prime Minister Mr.Jawaharlal Nehru. This statement is true even today.

The United Nations has stated in 2008, that most countries in the world would see urbanization but, for India it would not be before 2050. The people, age-old culture, tourist wonders, the money making business opportunities all exist in the rural. The focus is slowly shifting from the urban to the rural; the government as well as private concerns are looking at the rural areas for growth and sustenance.

Rural India has been a great cushion during the days of financial downturn, which affected the entire world. We are still able to manage a positive GDP growth rate because of the promising opportunities and untapped avenues in the rural.

Though there seems to be a smooth road ahead, those convincing factors discussed in the high-end conferences do not seem to help the rural population. A revolution needs to be triggered; a new battle needs to be fought for the financial independence and freedom from bureaucracy.

There are two major occupations which provide livelihood to the rural people. One is agriculture which occupies the labour in the farm and the rich farmers who own farm land. To deal with the employment problems in this field the government has introduced NREGA (which is the focus in the upcoming article). The other major occupation is art and craft, which brings the involvement of small scale industry. Art and craft is diverse all through India and is dependent on the cultural aspects of the region. Hence, this area of work faces the problem of no sustainable employment, not even seasonal employment.

Rural Development organizations and especially Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) has brought out the need for more and more employment opportunities to be created for the rural folks. There is a need for entrepreneurial initiatives for in rural India, where the artisans can create employment for themselves and also employ other artisans involved in the craft.

The skills and abilities to enable self-employment are provided in abundance to the urban youth. Rural India is looking for help from urban folks to create better employment opportunities and revolutionize the economic and recruitment system prevailing in the rural areas. To add to this, the United Nations report also stated that “the focus for increasing employment opportunities should be in the non-farm sector”.

Let us start the revolution.

Environment Conscious: Paper waste

Global Warming, acidification, waste lands, are the hot words being discussed now a days. Clean tech is the next big bubble most VCs and investors are watching out for....

People see a saucy opportunity in this field, especially in India. Here is a random overview about the recycling paper industry and activities happening around it.

For 80% of the 630 paper mills in India waste paper is a a key raw material. Ragpicking is a great occupation supporting this. Around 4.6 million tonne of waste paper gets imported from Europe every year.
India Opportunity: 8.5 million tonne of paper consumed every year in the country, only 1.4 million gets recycled back to the industry..ITC launched WOW in April 2007 which aims to inculcate a habit of segregating waste and increasing the level of recycling garbage.
Interesting startup: Daily Dump

More info on the following blogs
http://greentechindia.blogspot.com/
http://www.cleantechblog.com/2006/04/indias-growing-renewable-energy-market.html

OUTLIERS

Dear Friends,

I am reading the book OUTLIERS written by Malcolm Gladwell. Here is an excerpt from the book that turned like a driller into my head. The head is filled with strong ideas which make us feel that we are great or that we are not so great.
Especially as successful entrepreneurs we need to be always alert to help the budding entrepreneurs. You will know why when you read this excerpt.

Malcolm Gladwell says "I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work. People don't rise from nothing. We do owe to something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.

Biologists often talk about the "ecology" of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warned them, the soil in which they put down the roots and the rabbits and lunberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?"

Hope the positive side of every entrepreneur is kindled.

Business Plan Template: Idea Stage

Business Plan Template Blog

View more presentations from Nischala.

Business Plan Template

This is another stop where I felt knowledge sharing is required.
As entrepreneurs we all have to prepare a business plan at some point of time.
I am also at this juncture. I will be soon updating a business plan template for all my blog readers which is specific for idea stage firms, looking for funding and with a market focus being India.

This would be helpful to technical and non-technical folks.

Recession Time: Opportunity Time

Courtesy: The Economic Times

The message was loud and clear — the time has come. The ongoing recession is the best time to start out and the nation should let go of its hang-ups about business and government, business, media and civil society should come together to ensure that a billion ideas bloom. An elite panel at the The Power of Ideas discussion in Delhi (topic: Ecosystem for Innovativeness in India and Is Jugaad a Means of Disruptive Innovation?) threw up diverse ideas to create the right ecosystem for entrepreneurs. If a former bureaucrat-turned-head of India’s biggest car maker-turned entrepreneur wanted government policies to promote small companies instead of protecting them, a serial entrepreneur who is now seeding enterprises wanted a radical socio-economic shift, wherein the next-door aunt wouldn’t disapprove if one were to give up his job and start a venture. In an ecosystem, which is skewed towards the regular 9-to-5 office routine, an individual leaving his cushy MNC job to venture into something innovative is considered foolish. “And that is why the condemnation of a new idea needs to be done away with and success stories need to be blown out of proportion; failures need to be looked at as stepping-stones if India has to create entrepreneurs,” said Raman Roy, managing director of BPO firm Quatrro, and one of the pioneers of India’s BPO industry. And indeed, it was evident from the Indian’s inclination for jugaad that he/she had an entrepreneurial streak.

It was necessary that people with ideas be given the right ecosystem to turn their jugaad into appropriate technology and then, into business propositions. Said the former head of auto-maker Maruti and now MD of Carnation Auto, Jagdish Khattar: “It is difficult for start-ups to thrive in an environment where it had no governmental support in terms of policy and with little or poor infrastructure. Although some sectors, particularly information technology, have spawned entrepreneurship without any help from the government that model cannot be replicated in manufacturing. “Manufacturing has to depend on the government for facilities whereas IT does well because the government has no role to play in it,” Mr Khattar said. “Infrastructure will vary from industry to industry and for some sectors, it can be critical.” In the US, entrepreneurship is the real driver of the economy. Angels invested $29.4 billion in over 57,000 early stage startups, which comes to an average of $0.51 million per deal. VCs, on the other hand, invested $26.1 billion in 3,912 startups in the same year at an average of $6.7 million per deal.

In India, on the other hand, of the $19.5 billion that was invested by VCs and PEs combined (excluding angels), less than 6% went into startups. But interestingly, though the volume of deals might be significantly lower, the average VC deal size is much larger in India. $1.3 billion was invested by VCs in 2007 across 75 deals, at an average of $17.3 million per deal, which is almost three times that in the US, in the same year. “There are no figures available for angels in India but we at the Indian Angel Network have invested close to Rs 20 crore in about 15-16 early-stage startups,” said Saurabh Srivastava, founder IAN. The discussion revolved around the concept of jugaad (a unique approach to innovation in India) and how it can lead to a disruptive change in businesses. Fortis Healthcare chairman and MD Shivinder Singh said, “We are at a stage where pieces of innovations are coming up.

We are in the process of putting the pieces together. There has to be trigger point where people can go out and say ‘I want to do it’.” Indians are genetically known to be ntrepreneurial. “In fact, every second guy is a jugaadu,” he said. The biggest difficulty Mr Singh faces in his standardised hospitals is the fact that everyone wants to do things differently.

That’s not entrepreneurial. But the inclination for doing things the jugaad way is a prerequisite to being entrepreneurial. “One major way of strengthening the ecosystem is to engage industries with universities like they do it in the US. Even the idea of sponsors coming to universities is not entertained in India,” Mr Singh said. Mr Srivastava insisted that industry should come in full support of entrepreneurs. “You need a scenario where entrepreneurs can get funding, encouragement and mentoring. We have to make it easier for startups to operate. Today, it is easier for a large company to operate than a small startup,” he said. Mr Khattar had a suggestion for the government to pitch in with support. “Like the education cess, why doesn’t the government create a similar fund for entrepreneurship?” he asked.

Startup Identity: Logo Creation

Branding is a marketing concept used to create a position for the product or service in the consumer's mind. Logo is something that brings an identity to a firm helps to create a strong brand for the organisation. Here are few things we have to keep in mind while creating a logo and especially when you are talking to a logo designer about it- It is all about branding:

Create a company description - describing in which sector your firm operates
Create a logo theme - include specific colours, font type; if any on your mind
Ensure that you create them in both RGB and CMYK colour codes.
Get editable and printable files from your designer
Create logo that would be right for web and print resolution.

Please add if there are any more inputs.
Following are a few links where you can create your logos:
http://www.freeflashlogos.com/
http://www.simwebsol.com/ImageTool/
http://googlefont.com/
http://www.logoease.com/

Critics Everywhere: Hurdle 1

This is going to be a series that will pop up as and when I face a hurdle as an entrepreneur. Today I faced my first hurdle of "critic views".
Critics are of two types, who I have faced in my journey;
1. Someone who adds value to the situation
2. Someone who actually doesn't like you or your idea or who is arrogant and prejudiced about their own ideas

Well I faced both of them. It is really nice to have critics of the first category but second ones are dangerous. They are like slow poison. Their words keep beeing in your heads and someday you will believe that they were right and you are wrong. Well don't worry, it is just hypnosis.

We face so many such people who have prejudiced ideas about a person and experiences. They are not ready to look at a better picture which they always would have faced the other way.

I find critics everywhere, whenever I take my business plan and put it on their table grrrrrrrrrr, uh enough.
I want some value inputs not what you think about me.

So entrepreneurs.......... who are feeling dejected and disoriented about yourselves, fasten your seat belts and stick to the throne..........you have a long way to go, to achieve your dream and to walk on this path.
Shake these criticisms and walk on.

Businesses to start during recession and still be profitable

Consumers look for value add and security oriented solutions. So here are the problems one can address at the time of downturn and make money out of it:

Job seeking
Car Insurance
Funeral Homes
Health Care
Loyalty programmes where customers can save money
Second hand goods

Hope this gives rise many more interesting verticals.