An Uplifting Afternoon At Micrograam" s Trailblazer Talk At Infosys With Harish Hande
Despite the whirlwind of event planning, I was eagerly anticipating our inaugural Trailblazer Talk featuring Harish Hande at Infosys in Bangalore on May 3rd. The first time I heard Mr. Hande speak was in January at the Deshpande Foundation Development Dialogs in Hubli, Karnataka. Although I only remember snapshots of his captivating speech, the feeling that his speech elicited lasted for days: a deep sense of urgency, purpose, and motivation to take action. By the end his humorous and yet persuasive talk, I was eager to take part of in learning about the 'real, rural India'.
The Trailblazer's Talk did not disappoint; Harish has a unique ability to candidly speak about his colorful experiences starting SELCO, while inspiring those around him. He began by describing the deeply dedicated and committed staff that works at SELCO. To our surprise, he recounted a conversation with an employee who flatly refused to accept a raise because the employee did not feel he deserved it based on his performance. The employee went as far as refusing to accept his pay for weeks and worked on Sundays protest to his raise. Ultimately the employee's wife came to the office because the family needed his salary to subsist; the raise in question was a mere 200 rupees. Harish attributed the success of SELCO to the perseverance and unwavering commitment of such employees; from the beginning they never doubted whether SELCO would succeed. It was through such employees that SELCO has illuminated over 150,000 rural households in India using solar lights.
Harish told an anecdote from the humble beginning of SELCO when he and two of his employees went to Madikeri to install solar lights. After a particularly difficult installation, the owner of the home informed them that he did not have enough money to pay them. As a result, the three were stuck at the train station without money to get back to Mysore. While Harish worried and mildly panicked, his two employees were calm and told their boss to relax. They worked as coolies for two hours and earned enough money to purchase their tickets back. As Harish reiterated multiples times during his talk, the more education a person receives, the less resourceful, creative and proactive they are in the field. In the train station in Madikeri, his PhD was useless next to the scrappy practicality of his 4th standard drop-out colleagues. Now SELCO has blossomed from those two employees to 170 employees in 25 energy service centers throughout Karnataka and Gujarat.
Harish also spoke about the importance of genuinely understanding the daily lives of your target market in any business endeavor. For Harish, that meant living without electricity in rural Sri Lanka and India for 2 and a half year. For MicroGraam, that means understand the day to day challenges of our borrowers from students, to farmers, and micro-entrepreneurs. Although SELCO originally started by providing low cost solar lamps for the poor, he quickly realized they had just as diverse preferences as higher income customers have. As day laborers, some of SELCO's customers needed to charge mobile phones because their employers would call them at a moment's notice for work. Street vendors do not have identical needs; potato vendors need yellow lights while tomato vendors need white lights. Flower vendors need both of their hands to be free while picking flowers- for them SELCO designed headlamps. I n addition to understanding his customers, Harish stressed the importance of looking beyond your 'gated car windows' to respect and rediscover rural India.
As a result of the IT boom in India, globalization inevitably led to urbanization. Unfortunately urbanization has changed the perception of one of the most 'noble professions', as one Infoscion in the audience pointed out. Few members of the next generation of farmers want pursue agriculture. One reason why farming is losing popularity in addition to respect is the bias of the English media towards English speaking entrepreneurs. He cited the lack of media coverage regarding the work of Nileema Mishra, a fellow 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award Winner and non-English speaker. Although Nileema's work with Bhagini Nivedita Gramin Vigyan Niketan has prevented thousands of farmer suicides, created innovated microcredit and Self Help Group models, she can barely raise the 13 lakhs to cover her yearly expenses even after the Magsaysay Award. One of her elegant solutions was to give husbands microcredit loans, only if their wife's hemoglobin level was up to a certain level. The wife's well-being was a precursor to micro-credit!
After such an inspiring talk that took us from the heart of Electronic City to Harish's rural India, many of us in the audience were wondering, now what can I do? Do we donate to SELCO, lend through MicroGraam, or should we volunteer to work with organizations? One Infoscion asked what he could do to help, Harish encouraged the tech savvy audience to take their children to rural areas so they will experience India and become the next changemakers, or should we say trailblazers.
The Trailblazer's Talk did not disappoint; Harish has a unique ability to candidly speak about his colorful experiences starting SELCO, while inspiring those around him. He began by describing the deeply dedicated and committed staff that works at SELCO. To our surprise, he recounted a conversation with an employee who flatly refused to accept a raise because the employee did not feel he deserved it based on his performance. The employee went as far as refusing to accept his pay for weeks and worked on Sundays protest to his raise. Ultimately the employee's wife came to the office because the family needed his salary to subsist; the raise in question was a mere 200 rupees. Harish attributed the success of SELCO to the perseverance and unwavering commitment of such employees; from the beginning they never doubted whether SELCO would succeed. It was through such employees that SELCO has illuminated over 150,000 rural households in India using solar lights.
Harish told an anecdote from the humble beginning of SELCO when he and two of his employees went to Madikeri to install solar lights. After a particularly difficult installation, the owner of the home informed them that he did not have enough money to pay them. As a result, the three were stuck at the train station without money to get back to Mysore. While Harish worried and mildly panicked, his two employees were calm and told their boss to relax. They worked as coolies for two hours and earned enough money to purchase their tickets back. As Harish reiterated multiples times during his talk, the more education a person receives, the less resourceful, creative and proactive they are in the field. In the train station in Madikeri, his PhD was useless next to the scrappy practicality of his 4th standard drop-out colleagues. Now SELCO has blossomed from those two employees to 170 employees in 25 energy service centers throughout Karnataka and Gujarat.
Harish also spoke about the importance of genuinely understanding the daily lives of your target market in any business endeavor. For Harish, that meant living without electricity in rural Sri Lanka and India for 2 and a half year. For MicroGraam, that means understand the day to day challenges of our borrowers from students, to farmers, and micro-entrepreneurs. Although SELCO originally started by providing low cost solar lamps for the poor, he quickly realized they had just as diverse preferences as higher income customers have. As day laborers, some of SELCO's customers needed to charge mobile phones because their employers would call them at a moment's notice for work. Street vendors do not have identical needs; potato vendors need yellow lights while tomato vendors need white lights. Flower vendors need both of their hands to be free while picking flowers- for them SELCO designed headlamps. I n addition to understanding his customers, Harish stressed the importance of looking beyond your 'gated car windows' to respect and rediscover rural India.
As a result of the IT boom in India, globalization inevitably led to urbanization. Unfortunately urbanization has changed the perception of one of the most 'noble professions', as one Infoscion in the audience pointed out. Few members of the next generation of farmers want pursue agriculture. One reason why farming is losing popularity in addition to respect is the bias of the English media towards English speaking entrepreneurs. He cited the lack of media coverage regarding the work of Nileema Mishra, a fellow 2011 Ramon Magsaysay Award Winner and non-English speaker. Although Nileema's work with Bhagini Nivedita Gramin Vigyan Niketan has prevented thousands of farmer suicides, created innovated microcredit and Self Help Group models, she can barely raise the 13 lakhs to cover her yearly expenses even after the Magsaysay Award. One of her elegant solutions was to give husbands microcredit loans, only if their wife's hemoglobin level was up to a certain level. The wife's well-being was a precursor to micro-credit!
After such an inspiring talk that took us from the heart of Electronic City to Harish's rural India, many of us in the audience were wondering, now what can I do? Do we donate to SELCO, lend through MicroGraam, or should we volunteer to work with organizations? One Infoscion asked what he could do to help, Harish encouraged the tech savvy audience to take their children to rural areas so they will experience India and become the next changemakers, or should we say trailblazers.
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