ASSAM: As an eight-year-old, Sanjay Kumar Agarwalla would walk barefoot from his shabby home in Assam's Mariani town to his school. He has since walked his way from being a potato shop employee to being one of the top potato merchants of Upper Assam all of it with a touch of the surreal.
In 2015, Sanjay was trying to find an old contact Prasanta Bagui, a potato merchant from Champadanga in West Bengal. He found Prasanta in a pitiable condition. Huge losses in business had virtually reduced him to a pauper.
His plight took him back to 1996: Sanjay worked at a potato shop in Dibrugarh earning a meagre Rs 1,000 a month. He quit the job and thought of reviving his father's petty business at Mariani. That was when Prasanta had come to his rescue.
"He sent me a truckload of potatoes along with a weighing scale after I had borrowed money from a relative and repaired my father's rented shop to begin life anew. Knowing my condition, he even paid the truck fare. I paid him back in due course," Sanjay recalls.
Later, Sanjay started dealing with another Guwahati dealer and lost contact with Prasanta. By 2015, Sanjay had become a big trader with his business spread across Upper Assam, Nagaland and West Bengal. When he learnt about Prasanta's losses, he decided to see him. "I received a call from him in 2014. He said he was in debts after suffering losses and asked for a loan of Rs 25,000 which I gave," he says.
"In 2015, I went to his village and found him after a search. He had lost everything. I took him to a salon to get his long beard shaved, fed him and got clothes for him. I was sending 84 wagons of potatoes to two traders in Assam's Jorhat and Tinsukia from Kolkata by two goods trains. I gave the entire amount of profit to him so that he could recover. Today, he is successful again," Sanjay says.
Sanjay's great grandfather, Ganpat Rai Agarwalla had migrated to adjoining Dissoi Tea Estate from Rajasthan. Sanjay says the family did brisk business during the times of his grandfather and great grandfather.
He says in 1982, his father opened a shop at Nijorapar on the outskirts of Mariani with Rs 1,300 taken from Sanjay's maternal uncle. "Those were the most difficult days for our five-member family. My parents, two brothers and I used to sleep on empty sacks of rice laid on the floor. By 1988, my father made a small fortune of Rs 35,000. He would save Rs 10 a day and keep it in the bank. However, the entire amount had to be spent on the treatment of my mother who fell seriously ill. We were back to square one," he says.
From 1996 to 2008, Sanjay had a steady growth in his potato and onion business. He purchased a plot of land by a highway, near Mariani. The turnaround came in 2008 when two Guwahati businessmen approached him to set up a cold storage on his land. "They invested and I gave my labour. After the cold storage was set up, there was tremendous growth in my business," Sanjay says.
He is also the local distributor of ITC Ltd and Ruchi Soya Industries Limited. He has given employment to some 250 poor people. "I have helped small traders. When someone comes to me seeking a job, I try to find out his financial position, not his academic degree," he added. Sometime back, on the instruction of State Bank of India authorities, bank officials from Jorhat visited him to document his success history.