IN CONVERSATION WITH MR. RAHUL KALE

Mr. Rahul Kale

We recently conducted an interview with Mr. Rahul Kale, a Trustee at the Sir Gangadharrao Chitnavis Trust, located in the city of Nagpur, in Maharashtra. He has done his MBA from HEC, Paris and has been actively involved with his family businesses of jewellery retailing and cosmetic manufacturing, and also started his own beauty brand in the year 2006. He has also been actively involved with the Chitnavis Trust and has focused on skill development for specially-abled youth. Recently, he has initiated the Parth Project, with an aim to impart information about the essential skills and knowledge needed for micro-entrepreneurs to start or further their own micro-businesses. The Project has been implemented via the creation of YouTube videos, posted on Parth Project’s YouTube page.

What motivated the initiation of the Parth Project?

During the lockdown, obviously there was a widespread problem of unemployment – a lot of people were laid off from their jobs, especially the casual workers and labourers. There was a realisation around the month of April, that these people just wanted to head back to their home villages, which, in some cases, were about 1500-2000 kms away from their place of work – such as when place of work was western and southern India, and place of origin was eastern or northern India. The main realisation that came was that there was a comfort factor in going back home – but what had been holding them back so far was that their home villages did not provide them any opportunities. So, a very broad large goal is to offer employment to these people across the country, within their own villages – where they have a comparatively better standard of living, as opposed to life in perhaps a city slum. Further, even people that are living in urban areas, who carry out small home-based businesses, or who do contracted work like electricians, plumbers etc – people that are employed in the informal sector, which constitutes a majority of our economy, did not have work during the lockdown. For three to four months they suffered, and found it hard to make ends meet. There have been multiple esteemed NGOs that stepped in to alleviate the short-term issues, and have done a spectacular job with that – by getting food to people. Our objective with Parth was to look at more the medium and long-term impact that this Project would have. Even though people with running businesses did face massive difficulties during the lockdown period, but from August-September onwards they were able to get their businesses running again, and get kitchens running as well. But what about the people that had to head back to their villages with no opportunities to come back, or those without opportunities in the future? This is basically what motivated the Project, and these migrant workers comprise the main target audience of our Project.

What is the main idea of the Project? What are the specific problems that you aim to solve?

Last year we conducted a workshop for differently abled, and people with very very few resources, who wanted to start their own businesses. These businesses were to be the smallest micro-businesses. There were three basic concerns – first, they felt that they were fully capable of running their business, and had a brilliant idea, but lacked startup finances. Second, startup finance is important definitely, but they weren’t sure of how/ didn’t understand the need to assess what demand there is in the market for their business idea – would there be a demand for the product or service that they would offer, is there potential to scale it up further. They also did not realise that working capital finance was perhaps more important than startup finance, which was their only aim. The third problem is the lack of ideas – which if they really do put in some effort, and were given some guidance, they have the potential to come up with some brilliant ideas. People in India are so creative, but they just need a little bit of a push, and some hand-holding to guide them in the right direction. So our main objective was two-fold – to enable people to formulate ideas, by giving them some starting points and further to tell them how they can do it. We are not a hand-holding NGO yet, where we can step by step take them through the entire process – but that is the ultimate aim. At this point, the objective is just to inspire people, for them to start thinking outside the box and realise ‘hum ye bhi kar sakte hai’. When we conducted the workshop, all the attendees’ main problem was not that they did not want to start a business, or that they did not have an idea – but that they did not have the finances. So another main objective was to help them realise that there are many other aspects to starting a business.

How was the Project conducted and implemented?

Since in the lockdown, we couldn’t conduct physical classes, our dedicated team at the Chitnavis Trust thought of taking the Project online.

[Behind The Scenes too started their own youtube page for these very reasons. Check out the same here.]

The Project was basically implemented through a YouTube channel, and we created videos on various topics pertinent to micro-business and micro-entrepreneurship – such as business plans and legalities. Before we got into the Project however, we conducted a small survey on digital literacy – about whether the target beneficiaries that we were looking at had access to smartphones, data, the cost of data for them and whether they were willing to spend money on data. What we realised was that data was actually pretty affordable in our country, but unfortunately it is used for all kinds of unproductive activities – rather than focusing on investing time in something gainful, the internet is used more for timepass. So, in order to provide a more productive usage of data, we thought of creating a YouTube channel since people are familiar with YouTube and it is widely accessible – links are easily shareable and it is an open platform. We studied a lot of other channels also set up for similar purposes, and they were all on YouTube as well. After deciding on YouTube, we conducted extensive preliminary research along with the team at Chitnavis Trust and a group of dedicated interns, and outlined different segments to be converted into videos and then content. We divided the segments into three parts – based on our understanding on what was most relevant. We also contacted and asked a few target beneficiaries what they felt was an impediment to them starting their own businesses, which obviously started with finance followed by access to government schemes that support micro-entrepreneurs. Some topics were also added based on lesser widely thought about topics, but ones that we thought were extremely important – such as having a concrete marketing plan, which one needs to think about prior to starting the business, and not after. So, it was a combination of two things – the beneficiaries’ needs assessment and our own understanding of what the gaps that they might face were. Then, we contacted specialists in the field of each segment and created videos with them talking about the different aspects of micro-businesses and micro-entrepreneurship.

With Parth, we’ve created a good base of resources, and what we can do is spread the word around, and help these reach the target beneficiaries. Social media and facebook is not the right way to reach our beneficiaries, who respond more positively to audio-visual content. So, we need to think of more creative ways to reach them, and aid them – which is why at this point, with Parth, we are looking at guest promotions and influencer promotions to boost our videos. As citizens, sometimes we take it for granted that even people like our target beneficiaries, who have very little access to resources and information, will know how to do things. However, even though they are extremely resourceful and capable, it is essential to get the right information to them. They might need a little bit of hand-holding, little bit of guidance to show them the right path and direction, and a little bit of motivation to push them to think and believe that they can actually stand on their own two feet. So, as people with more access to resources and information, if we are able to bridge that gap, it would be really wonderful.

In order to know more about this project, follow them on facebook -https://m.facebook.com/ParthProject