Ravi Venkatesan: ‘Fewer jobs but more opportunities’

Civil Society News, New Delhi

THE scenes are all too familiar. Tens of thousands showing up to claim a couple of government jobs. Children trudging their way through school, barely learning to read or write. Where will employment for so many millions of Indians come from, especially when even those who get a college education don’t find takers?

Such grim odds, that too amid rising expectations, call for less orthodox solutions. For instance, inculcation of an ‘entrepreneurial mindset’ could be one way out. It would take people from being job-seekers to self-starters.

Ravi Venkatesan believes that the future lies in helping the inventive and risk-taking spirit in individuals blossom by connecting them to success stories, cleaning up regulation, making finance available and handholding them in the adoption of modern technologies.

Venkatesan is the co-founder of GAME or Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship. He used to be the chairman of Microsoft India and has held other significant corporate jobs.

He has been working innovatively on the employment problem in the country and we spoke to him recently to catch up.

 

Q: When we last met, you were deeply involved with the Delhi school programme on entrepreneurship. How is that doing?

The Delhi school programme is now running in 13 states. And I think, according to the latest numbers, four and a half million kids a day are going through this programme.

That’s one of our successes. It’s run by my co-founder, Mekin (Maheshwari), and the Udhyam Learning Foundation. It’s an extraordinary success which continues to spread to more and more states.

It turns out that this whole issue is very complicated, like most things. We’ve had many interventions which have been successful. For instance, we focused on how to make it easier to register a small company and operate as a small business, something that the finance minister said a lot about in her Budget speech.

We’ve worked for two years in Punjab. Most of these issues are actually at the state and local level and not at the Central government level. We did a tremendous amount of work on decriminalization, simplification and digitization of regulations in Punjab and we’re trying to see how to take it to more states.

 

Q: What exactly does that mean? Putting processes online or what?  

It means that you first look at the regulatory thicket. How many regulations does a small factory or a small food business have to comply with? And then you understand how many of them are actually criminal offences. It turns out, for instance, that under some Factories Act, if you don’t lime wash your factory walls, it’s a criminal offence. This is a regulation that’s more than a hundred years old. It may have made some sense then. It certainly makes no sense today. Of course, nobody goes to jail now. But it becomes an opportunity to make some money.

There’s a nice report that we put out on this. But, basically, you go and understand working with the government. Usually, the friction is over environmental compliances or fire and safety issues.

You work to try and decriminalize, simplify the number of compliances and then the final step is — can you digitize many of these so that there is no human interface and there’s no application of judgement required which is where a lot of the problems arise. So, if you can actually just do it all online then it makes it easier.  The work in Punjab was quite successful until the government changed.

 

Q: How long was this work going on in Punjab?

Two years. Then the AAP government came in and it all stopped. When Vini Mahajan was chief secretary and Captain (Amarinder Singh) was the chief minister, the environment was very conducive to progress on
all this.

We have been focused a lot on what we can do to support women. If it’s hard for a man, it’s even harder for a woman entrepreneur. Only 20 percent of businesses are women-owned. Then, if you look beyond self-employed businesses, that number is actually four or five.

We did many things which didn’t work, but the one that seems to be really showing lots of promise is our work with aggregator and collective organizations like YouthNet in Nagaland and elsewhere in the Northeast or Saath in Gujarat.

Through these collectives, we’re able to get a lot more women transacting on e-commerce platforms like Amazon. You have to do a lot of work on capacity building of these entrepreneurs as well as with the platforms to make this possible. It’s showing great promise and our goal is to create 250,000 women entrepreneurs transacting and improving their incomes.

 

Q: In the Northeast or all over India?

All over India, but the Northeast is particularly good because of our partner, YouthNet. It was covered in the Economic Survey because Anand Nageswaran liked that initiative in particular. Then we’ve done quite a bit of work on improving access to loans for small businesses, first-time entrepreneurs.

 

Q: Give us an idea of what the entrepreneurship programme has meant for the four million kids it has worked with. Is there any way of assessing that?

There is. What we’re saying is, in the 21st century there are going to be fewer jobs but more opportunities. And so everybody needs an entrepreneurial mindset, whether or not you’re actually going to start your own business. Our point is, every young person needs to be exposed to this, and what we’re seeing is it has already had a dramatic effect on their engagement levels, their academic performance in school.

And then you’re seeing about 10 percent of them moving down a path of actually starting businesses. One of the aspects of this programme is whenever the state government is really supportive, they give small loans to these students to start a real business. Those tiny seed loans are working really well.

 

Q: What is the kind of entrepreneurial activity they might get into?

Well, the smallest ones are typically in services. For instance, there’s a guy called Monu whom I bought a toolbox. He was repairing electric rickshaws in Delhi. There’s another guy who’s actually started a truck logistics company. He doesn’t own the trucks. He runs a booking service, matching supply and demand. So that’s a more sophisticated kind of business. There are smaller efforts to start an electrical business. Many of them join Urban Company and become self-employed entrepreneurs to start with and then, hiring more people, become small businesses that work with the Urban Company platform, offering different types of services. All these case studies are documented.

 

Q: What is it that you put a young person through in this course?

Well, it turns out that entrepreneurship requires a certain fundamental mindset and skills. One is agency. Another is problem solving. The third is resilience or tenacity. The fourth is resourcefulness. You have to bootstrap your way and find a way to mobilize resources. We help them develop these skills experientially.

For instance, how do you teach a young person tenacity? You’ll start with a simple exercise like in the class you have to build a paper aeroplane with your weak hand, learn to fly that and compete with your classmates. So that’s a pretty frustrating thing for a kid to actually try and fold a piece of paper with your weak hand.

Or, you have to work in a team and build the highest object in the classroom. It requires imagination and working with other kids to accomplish this. They’ll pile books on a desk, then school bags on and then one kid will climb on top of that and somebody will climb on the back of that kid. Then there is the capstone programme. They have to get together and actually run a business during the summer holidays. They each get `1,000 as a loan. And so, five kids will get together and with `5,000 they have to figure out what business they can run during the summer holidays.

You also expose them to successful small entrepreneurs, somebody from their own community who’s running a kirana shop and they don’t realize that the kirana shop and chaiwala can easily make `3 lakh per month. You begin to see money and somebody from your own community doing this. They get exposed to a lot of role models.

 

Q: This would require an enormous amount of outreach?

Our partner, Udhyam Learning Foundation, does it, not GAME. It is an enormous amount of outreach. First of all, we work with state governments and unless the chief minister and the education minister are committed, we don’t go there because all this is delivered through the existing infrastructure of government schools and teachers. Then you have to put this into the curriculum, which is now possible through the new National Education Policy (NEP). This is part of skilling and immersive learning. Then you have to train the teachers on how to deliver this curriculum.

 

Q: People who are entrepreneurial don’t necessarily have to excel in traditional ways of learning, right?

That’s the point. When I started GAME six years ago, one of the most encouraging things for me was that during the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries or America in the 18th or 19th century, the vast majority of important entrepreneurs were illiterate and from very modest backgrounds, whether it was James Watt or Thomas Edison or Isaac Singer. They were, in a classical sense, complete failures. But that wasn’t a barrier for them to achieving success.  

 

Q: What is it like in rural areas? You know, rural entrepreneurship versus urban settings.

Well, this is where GAME is now becoming really interesting because we are getting on the ground. So far, we were trying to understand what the issues or challenges are, the barriers, the constraints and how do we solve them. Now we have to get into a location and see how we can inspire much more entrepreneurship and success.

We have been out on the ground in Nagpur district for the past year, in Nagpur city and also peri-urban areas. We are also working in Vizag district. We’ve got a partnership now with UP to be in every district. They have a programme or a scheme called M-YUVA to give interest-free loans to 100,000 first-time young entrepreneurs every year. This is a giant opportunity.

What we’re finding is people are lost. They don’t know what to do. And so, conversely, they’re very hungry and open. What you need to be able to do is show them what kind of businesses they can start. There’s no point asking them what sort of businesses they would like to start. They don’t know.

The more you can expose them to different businesses which require relatively low capital investment, below `10 lakh, the more likely they will be able to do it. 

One of our more interesting pieces of work has been to identify businesses that are relevant everywhere. For instance, we are working with an organization called SELCO (Solar Electric Light Company). They have 175 different businesses which are powered by small solar panels, whether it’s a milking machine and a milk chiller or a roti-making machine, or a chilli dryer.

They’ve had significant success, mobilizing 25,000 entrepreneurs in Karnataka to start these types of businesses. What we’re saying is, why can’t we take SELCO to every state in the country?

There are many, many people in the country who’ve done a fantastic job with sustainable agriculture. These are models which require no pesticide, no fertilizer, no seeds and you’re able to build a circular economy at the unit farm level.

I was with this farmer in Ahmedabad who runs Bansi Gir farms. It’s such a good model. He is already working with 6,000 farmers. How do we take him and expose him to farmers in many more locations? We don’t want to push them. Our job is to make the connections so that adoption can happen.

 

Q: Millions of people apply for jobs. What do you do about people who aspire to only that one job in the police or in government?

One of the things we have to do is figure out a model that can self-replicate in many, many locations. It should have local support.

The idea is like the RSS shakhas. Can we have lots of these local units which self-organize around a common idea and template? Can we get there in the next 12 or 18 months?  It has to be a movement of volunteers, not about paid people going there, showing up and trying to do something.

I’ve abandoned the idea of creating an organization that can go to more and more places and do things, and raises philanthropic grant money to do it.

I’m much more excited about creating a model where somebody who hears about it in Coimbatore and gets excited, starts a local chapter, plugging into a national network where these business models are available. That’s the network model I’m focused on building and want to put in place quickly. It’s a bottom-up movement with which it will be possible to scale up rapidly.