he Jagriti Yatra, a 15-day train journey that takes 450 budding entrepreneurs around the country, is a large enterprise in itself but it is just one layer of a larger vision to promote social enterprise. The key to understanding this larger idea lies in Deoria, a district in eastern Uttar Pradesh, which will act as an epicentre to put this plan into action.
Deoria is a district with a population of about three million and with an average annual per capita income of about Rs 10,000.
It is here that the team behind the Jagriti Yatra plans to set up and operationalise the Jagriti Enterprise Network (JEN), an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and facilitators, who will kickoff the process of building up what the team refers to as middle India, or the collective of tier-two and tier-three towns that account for more than 50 per cent of the country’s population.
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Why Deoria? The team behind the yatra has previous experience in this district, having set up the Jagriti Sewa Sansthan, a non-profit foundation here in 2011. The foundation has already done work with skill development, notably working with women to develop handicraft skills but the JEN is something altogether bigger.
“Over eight years of doing the Jagriti Yatra we have built up an incredible ecosystem of about 3,700 people,” explains Amit Raj, executive director of the Jagriti Enterprise Network. Mr Raj is a yatri from the previous year, a former engineer with Infosys, who joined the train as one of the older facilitators who guide the younger yatris aged between 20 and 27.
“The ecosystem consists of the role models we visit, senior people from corporations who have come along as facilitators and several ex-yatris. They all want to continue to be associated with us in some way,” he explains.
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Everything the JEN needs to bring a sense of entrepreneurship to poorer districts such as Deoria, Mr Raj explains, is already in this ecosystem. And it will be used for tackling three problems, namely access to funds and markets, enterprise knowledge and experience.
To illustrate, Mr Raj gives an example of a project that the team has already launched in Deoria with turmeric farming. “We found that agriculture is one of the main areas for starting an enterprise. In Deoria, for instance, the production of turmeric, mushroom and corn is huge but the product is not processed and is sold on the market without any value addition.”
What the team did was to create a value chain, first tying up with the TATA Trust, previous sponsors of the Jagriti Yatra, to sponsor research in turmeric processing. The turmeric from Deoria was then taken to godowns in Kanpur, Sangli and other districts in Andhra Pradesh, which are major centres of turmeric production, and the Jagriti team also tied up with organisations like the Indian Institute of Spices to see how it could be processed and sold better.
“The idea of going to these centres was also given to us by the previous yatris so this is an example of the ecosystem at work. Of course, we only make the connections here and the final work of processing and selling the turmeric in Deoria will have to be done by local entrepreneurs,” Mr Raj explains.
At the national level or in the bigger cities, there is already a system through which entrepreneurs are able to get in touch with financier or facilitators, explains Shashank Mani Tripathi. “Angel networks, for instance, are a good example. Why can’t the same ecosystem be taken to tier-two and tier-three towns as a way of building them up?” he asks.
In the business of setting up enterprises, he believes, far too much attention has been paid to ideas and to funding and not enough to people. “It doesn’t have to be a big idea but the important thing is to find the people who will make it happen,” he explains. To make the JEN model work, the Jagriti team is trying to build an Udhyam corps – teams of people who will talk to entrepreneurs in the districts where the JEN operates to help them through with their ideas.
The word districts is used in the collective because that is what the JEN wants to be in the future. “We want the centre in Deoria to be a starting point to build up enterprises in other districts in the entire Purvanchal region,” Mr Tripathi explains.
“And then the plan is to set up similar centres in the South – in Madurai, in the East – in Ganjam in Orissa and the west in Maharashtra.”
The concerns of each region will obviously be different. While the big focus in Deoria is on agro businesses, the south centre, for instance, may focus on more women-oriented businesses and tribal business may be the focus in the east. The one barrier that will have to be overcome, however, is in urging people to take the risk that starting an enterprise entails.
“Many of the potential entrepreneurs we have worked with are in the informal sector and there is a little bit of hesitancy to expand their businesses beyond a point. It will be a gradual process,” Mr Raj explains.
What the JEN ultimately aims to do is to convince people that not starting an enterprise may be a bigger risk in the long run.
The yatra plans to set up an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and facilitators in Deoria