Nurture jugaad to foster rural business
Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal, at the inaugural of the Global Investors’ Meet (GIM)-2022 in Bengaluru on November 2, cited the case of the blockbuster film Kantara as an ideal example of a low-investment-high-returns business. The film, made with a budget of Rs 16 crore, has already yielded `300 crore in revenues. The Union minister’s Kantara analogy amused the delegates and received huge applause. They were aware that huge profit margins can be achieved by small businesses with low-cost resources generating effective solutions to meet targeted areas of demand. Jugaad has that potential.
Indians are no strangers to jugaad (quirky innovations), a concept of making new things with meagre resources, or solving problems using quicker, startling methods. Jugaad has seen innovations like the areca tree-climbing bike developed by an areca farmer-entrepreneur in Komale near Mangaluru who faced labour problems. He developed the contraption, which he calls the Areca Bike. It climbs 90 tall areca trees in a day using a litre of petrol. It cut labour costs and problems. The demand for Areca Bikes grew.
In the late 1980s, the Indian Institute of Science’s then Application of Science and Technology for Rural Areas (ASTRA) (now the Centre for Sustainable Technologies) developed a low-cost fruit/vegetable dryer to preserve the produce in a dried form for over a year while retaining the nutritive value. Farmers often destroy their own produce if the price depreciates or if their fruits/vegetables are wasted in times of glut. The drier can protect the yield from price fluctuations or glut and generate self-employment among women in rural areas. It gained popularity in some pockets of the country as women could directly sell the produce in a dried and packaged form but failed to sustain it due to a lack of nurturing it as a business model. The Atal Innovation Mission (AIM) fosters innovation, provides platforms and creates an umbrella structure to oversee innovation and the entrepreneurship ecosystem. But this needs to penetrate and spread into the vast Indian rural outback.
The GIM-2022 concluded on Friday with Rs 9.82 lakh crore worth MoUs signed against an expected Rs 7.5 lakh crore. There is talk of generating lakhs of job opportunities. But well-nurtured jugaad-based small business models can create entrepreneurship and self-employment widely among the rural youth. Outside of GIM-2022, that needs a more significant push.