The EPIC Alternative represents an underserved market brimming with potential for scale. Meet 5 entrepreneurs from small cities and villages in India who used ingenuity and willpower to construct their companies, representing hundreds of thousands of others. Here is how one can be a part of their progress story.
This text has been printed in partnership with Enmasse World.
‘Blind however with a imaginative and prescient for the long run.’
That is how Thrissur’s Geetha Saleesh views herself. On the age of 15 — when she was identified with a uncommon genetic dysfunction that compromised her imaginative and prescient finally resulting in blindness — if Geetha was instructed that she’d don the hat of a businesswoman sometime, she would have discounted it as a fantasy.
However at the moment, her desires are limitless.
No stranger to challenges, Geetha found early on that there are two antidotes to adversity — willpower and perseverance. Presently, she is on the helm of ‘House to House’, a startup that prides itself on natural turmeric-based merchandise. Her enterprise is witnessing spectacular success.
Astounding, isn’t it? The ripple impact of a easy concept!
As Geetha strides into her manufacturing unit each morning, her enthusiasm is clear. In any case, she resides her dream. However her story is just not in isolation; it echoes the untapped potential that lies inside many “Entrepreneurial Households” equivalent to hers throughout India, even in small cities, cities and villages.
The EPIC Tales Video contest organised by Enmasse World in collaboration with The Higher India was an try at underscoring the journeys of hundreds of thousands like Geetha who’re the drivers of the nation’s subsequent financial wave. The competition known as for entries from throughout the nation of people who find themselves turning their desires and aspirations into actuality by doing a spread of issues, from beginning companies to innovating in on a regular basis life, thus bringing monetary progress to their households. Storytellers from all corners of India joined in and the competition offered them with the stage to deliver the struggles and victories of Entrepreneurial Households (a time period coined by Enmasse) to mild.
What are Entrepreneurial Households? You’ll recognise them as savvy, business-minded, resilient households with a number of revenue streams and strategic borrowings, all leveraged for progress, and also you’ll discover them throughout you, and throughout the nation.
The objective of the competition, thus, was to ship out a transparent message that these properties are now not a sidenote within the margins. They maintain the transformative energy to form the way forward for the nation’s economic system.
A contest like this gives the chance for present and new entrepreneurs and enterprise leaders to maneuver the gaze away from huge cities and disposable incomes to small cities and core companies, and so they’ll discover that the market potential is immense. Enmasse World calls this the Financial Energy of Industrious Communities, or the EPIC Alternative.
A brand new age creed
In a 2022 story, Forbes India known as house owners of small dwelling companies the ‘OG entrepreneurs’. The moniker is backed by statistics. In accordance with a 2024 report by Praxis International Alliance for Enmasse World, in FY 2023, India’s 247 million entrepreneurial households drove an $8.8 trillion transaction worth — with a good portion being casual transactions, unleashing a brand new financial panorama.
The rise in home-owned companies and their success are a nod to the notion that the nation’s financial prospects don’t essentially lie within the fingers of economic enterprises. However slightly, that magic can typically be brewed within the smallest of farms and residential kitchens. That’s the place India’s collective progress story is unfolding, each single day.
Goals, in any case, don’t want area; they solely demand resilience.
Whereas we rejoice these heroes, the journey doesn’t finish right here. It’s only the start. The frequent false impression nonetheless says that people from such smaller cities and cities are an financial danger and that this phase is just not prepared for industrial engagement, for causes such because the unwillingness or lack of ability to pay for high quality items and companies. There’s a presumption that these communities usually are not economically vibrant and that folks need to transfer to huge cities within the pursuit of financial progress.
The street of financial vibrancy has lengthy been crowded with industrial and mainstream consumption. This is the reason, underneath the banner of the EPIC Alternative, Enmasse World is advocating a shift in notion and calling buyers, entrepreneurs, clients, you and me, to present the Entrepreneurial Households an opportunity.
Geetha’s story is reflective of this. It is usually one of many winners of the EPIC Tales Video contest. Right here’s a take a look at the opposite 4 winners.
The champions of change
Whereas Geetha discovered her calling within the kitchen, Maharashtra’s Yogesh Gawande discovered it within the fields. Watching his brother battle pesticide poisoning was each heartbreaking and galvanizing for Yogesh, a resident of Waluj village. He went on to start out Niyo Farm-Tech, which crafts easy, progressive, and inexpensive agri-equipment that ensures farmers usually are not in direct contact with pesticides. Certainly one of their hit merchandise is the wheel-based sprayer. As we speak, farmers in 22 states throughout India are being impacted by means of Yogesh’s innovation.
Sharing an analogous imaginative and prescient to empower farmers is a younger businessman Mohit Runge from Pandhurna, Madhya Pradesh. His ‘Keshava Dairy Plant’ has a twin vantage — it contributes to farmers’ revenue as milk is collected from them to make milk-based merchandise, whereas native youth employed on the dairy earn an revenue.
Sushant Uniyal is thought to be one thing of a hero in Dadur village in Uttarakhand. Sushant had simply accomplished his media research in 2017 when he says his brother had a brainwave to return to the village and experiment with mushroom farming. “We began with 2 kg and at the moment we produce 100 kg every day,” he smiles. Impressed by Sushant, many extra villagers determined to show their consideration to mushroom farming, with some becoming a member of Sushant’s farm and others taking steerage from him.
Equally, in Hyderabad, Keerthana’s wholesome snacking model 9Nutz is seeing an incredible response. The model gives a spread of millet-based sweets and chikkis (conventional Indian sweets made with nuts and jaggery). The inception of the model lay in Keerthana being appalled by individuals’s dependence on quick meals. She determined to present them one thing more healthy to satiate their cravings and lack of expertise didn’t deter her from diving headlong into entrepreneurial waters. And the way!
The 5 heroes you watched above are the torchbearers in what’s a protracted procession of individuals throughout India, together with from small cities and rural geographies who’ve desires they need to scale. Such an untapped mine of ambition and financial prosperity presents a once-in-a-generation inflection level to assist their aspirations.
All that’s wanted is a bridge to deliver them to the shore of financial prospects.
And we will construct it collectively.
Edited by Pranita Bhat
