How do you bring entrepreneurship to underprivileged people of India?

Lakshmi: BYST is a not-for-profit organisation that primarily assists disadvantaged Indian youth in developing business ideas into viable enterprises under the guidance of a mentor, with the main objective of turning job seekers into creators.

We started this unique model of ‘Guru-Shishya’ Parampara (teacher-disciple) relationship, wherein the mentor trains, supports, monitors and helps the entrepreneur in networking and nurturing them, till they are self-sufficient to run an ethical business and, in turn, make a valuable contribution to society through creation of wealth and employment.

We encourage applicants without asking for financial down payments or collaterals. The loan is provided at the special interest rate offered to small businesses.

We started off with our first BYST in New Delhi and now we have expanded to 10 regional clusters, including Tamil Nadu, rural Haryana, Odisha, Assam, etc And today I am happy to say that we have financed and created nearly 4,200 entrepreneurs creating employment for about 1,75,000 people, and 10 percent of BYST-supported entrepreneurs have become millionaires today.

YS: How do you choose your entrepreneurs? What are the challenges in convincing the underprivileged to take up entrepreneurship?

Laskshmi: BYST’s focus was always young people between the age of 18 and 35 years, who have a business idea, capacity, capability, passion and central focus to drive their ideas.

In the initial years, we went to villages, grassroot-level NGOs, ITIs (Indian Technical Institutes) and polytechnics and chose young people. In fact a Rajeswari, who manufactures printed computer stationery, one of the first entrepreneurs, turned a crorepati in seven years.

YS: How do you get mentors for your programme? Initially, it was a tough task for us to convince people from the corporate sector to mentor these entrepreneurs, but then JRD Tata took this up and inspired people, as he believed the worthiness of the idea and gave me all the courage to run the programme.

We explained the importance of knowledge sharing that the mentors need to do for the rural sector in the field of business. Mentors also feel this is their way of giving back to the society and 70-75 percent of mentors have some small business background and guide the entrepreneurs in the right way. We told the mentors to support our entrepreneurs for the first two years, but many of them continued their relationship for more than 10-12 years. Today, we have nearly 4,000 volunteers as mentors, who even travel 40-60km with us to reach the entrepreneur they mentor.

YS: What kind of ideas from the entrepreneurs do you support? But the mentors guide their simple ideas in the right way and today many of these entrepreneurs have succeeded as they have imbibed a commitment to excellence, quality and ethics from their mentors.

I still remember one of the first entrepreneurs who came forward to work with us was Pradeep Lumba from Delhi, who made corrugated boxes and started this in Haryana. I want this concept of reaching out to the target group, appreciating and admiring the potential of the group by creating mass mentoring movements, and support through incubation to rural India.

I want to demonstrate our success stories to bring about change in policy in the government at national level to reach out these potential youth of rural India.