Honest!

It started way back when in the 1940s Congress stalwarts like J C Kumarappan quietly triggered a deep change in business by catalysing the genius of the Indian villager. Enterprise lies, they believed and said, in the sinews and hearts of simple folk who can bring a change in their lives, as a group, and not with wealth and richness lying in the hands of just the minority business class.
There is tyranny inherent, said Gandhiji, in any form of ruling, be it in government or in business. Therefore, he said, business or governance has to come bottom-up, and not top-down.
And then over the decades the big bad ways of the West took over the world. It has remained in their hands since. And the chasm between the rich and the poor has become, sadly, unbridgeable.
It dismays us all to see how we—you and I—have succumbed to those market forces. You’ve to walk into any shopping mall anywhere in the world, and you’ll see how powerless you’re in the face of allure and desire that drives demand.
But there is still hope. There has been change, positive change. All you have to do is drive down a Sunday morning no more than an hour into the hinterland that we think is impoverished of opportunity. And you’ll see how little Self-help Groups have brought change, of a kind you can never dare to dream of bringing, in these wastelands called cities.
The powerful weapon these SHGs have used is micro-finance. If you take the trouble of reading a recent edition of The Economic & Political Weekly [xxxx, 2005], that revered publication that continues to articulate some of the most responsible thinking in India, you will realise the power that microfinance can wield.
It should come as a surprise to many—well, it shouldn’t—that as much as 70 per cent of the country’s entire trade and business volume is still driven by the lowly santhe, or Shandy, or the rural weekly market. In just one little pocket of the lush Arakku Valley—130 km to the west of Vizag, into the hills of the Eastern ghats—as much as Rs 1.25 crore of business gets transacted between no more than a cluster of thirty villages in a spread of 50 sq. km. That trade is every week. And this business is mostly of non-timber forest produce—everything that is resource-friendly. More about those shandies another time.
There lies enterprise everywhere around us. There are new rules of business that the world is defining, as you will see in the features presented in this edition. Of course, it is fraught with risks. And the group of people initiating these strategies is a minority.
To plough such green fields, to mix a metaphor, with business values that you offer for money people pay, is mined with problems. Even if you succeed in inviting people from the mainstream by the sheer romance of such ideas, you have to remember that the market is not prepared for the hazards that go with pioneering. Urbans won’t compromise comfort and convenience—and why should they?
And so for a successful eco-business that wants to break away from the static moulds of the conventional NGO which refuses to go beyond documenting into the rough-and-tumble of creating, we need ‘deliverables’, we need ‘vendor reliability’, we need good management that will recognize the pitfalls of prototyping, and we need ourselves to labour extra hard to make products dependable.
There is a sobering truth: [Quote the Economist Oil Crisis Cover issue].
There was a popular number of an Eighties band, and one line rang: “Every refuge has its price.” The Eagles didn’t quite know the import of what they sang so well. And in a world that’s fast wrenching every emotional anchor you have known, how do you retain sanity, without insisting on doing things you know are right? How do you cling to some sense of those old values that go beyond the present; and harbinge a future that reflects the past we are so rapidly losing?
Many believe it’s possible. Indeed, thirty years hence, we don’t have a choice but to return to the wisdom of the past. At BCIL, for instance, we have stumbled badly, made many mistakes. But we have known all along we are on the right path. It has caused us financial grief, but brought strength to our conviction.
The road to business with a heart is not without its difficulties, as this Edition shows. But it is do-able. You can gain a deal of satisfaction creating such ‘living futures’ as against the ‘suicide economies’ that continue to proliferate.
And you need not ever again think that profit is a four-letter-word. You can make for healthy business while remaining mindful of the planet’s resources.
Honest.
—The Ed.