The call of the valley

The call of the valley

Amala Menon had not given more than a fleeting thought to either becoming a businesswoman or a social entrepreneur.

She didn't need to. A flourishing career with the likes of telecom giants AT&T, Equant, the Tata group, IDC and Frost & Sullivan had brought the Singapore-based executive challenging assignments and a steady, high income.

However, her close associates kept cajoling her to do something outside of the corporate world. Their encouragement started Ms Menon on a journey that would take her from Africa to the foothills of the Himalayas. The 52-year-old mother of two is far from done.

Her first foray into business, three years ago, was Samastha Solutions - a corporate training solutions and process improvement consulting company. But finding work wasn't easy for a fledgling start-up.

"Often being a woman does get one discounted a little," says Ms Menon with a wry smile. She approached everyone she knew. "I realised over time that I was not very persevering and didn't have it in me to go twice to the same person.

This was not really good for an entrepreneur," she says of her initial struggle.

But repeat business from satisfied customers helped steady the ship. "Luckily for me, once I did something for them they asked me to come back again and again. One such anchor customer is a large retail business in Africa called Choppies."

A publicly-traded supermarket operator in Botswana, Choppies has expanded into Zimbabwe and South Africa. "There aren't very many corporates in Africa, especially Botswana," says Ms Menon.

"The ones that are there are always looking for ways to enhance their services and raise their professionalism." This is where she came in, conducting training programmes in areas such as leadership, team-building, change management, process improvement and re-engineering.

Once the business had grown, Ms Menon invited Mr Biju Chandrasekharan and Mr Phanindranath Kakarla to join her. Each partner came with diverse skills and areas of expertise, but together they have stayed focused on working on specific projects in a few industries.

The company changed its name to Finnovate Partners, which stands for financial innovation.

With her professional life stabilising, she felt a strong urge to give back to society. But her key input was to be innovation, not a money grant.

She explains: "I was very certain that I wanted to be a social entrepreneur and not just contribute to a charitable cause. I am almost against charity, when it starts making the receiver expect it almost as a right it discourages them from working.

"My personal opinion is that it makes us lose our self-respect without the receiver ever realising it! I loved the beauty and authencity of villages around the world and, therefore, I wanted to do something in the villages of India to begin with and, in the process, make the villagers feel a sense of pride in what they have and encourage them to preserve it."

Her idea was SaveAGram: A social enterprise that would create an additional source of income for villagers from authentic eco-tourism, an immersive experience for city-slickers looking to shed urban dust from their bodies and souls.

After paying off costs and salaries, profits would go back to supporting the village environment, children and women.

Gram in Sanskrit or Hindi means village. In April 1936, Mahatma Gandhi took up residence in Segaon on the outskirts of Wardha in Maharashtra. He renamed the hamlet Sevagram, which means "village of service". It remained the Mahatma's home from 1936 until his death in 1948.

Ms Menon's SaveAGram embodies Gandhi's vision of self-sufficient villages in a modern context.

Born out of an immediate need to provide a stable revenue stream to villages affected by the Himalayan floods of 2012, SaveAGram's key innovation was to offer visitors from cities a chance to experience unpretentious village life, savour organic, homemade meals and indulge in activities like hiking, yoga, white water-rafting and temple trails, all the while enjoying the genuine, heartfelt hospitality of the villagers.

This in turn would make the villagers also feel a sense of pride in what they had.

For SaveAGram's pilot project, she chose the breathtaking rural community of Gaja, located in the misty mountains of Uttarakhand in northern India.

Besides the magnificent vistas, organic produce and the ancient temple trails that Gaja offers, it is really the warmth of the local community that truly enthrals and amazes the visitors.

But, amid nature's bounty, lurks a tale of poverty. Families that have income earners in cities are relatively better off than those that depend entirely on eking out a living from subsistence farming.

While Ms Menon was relatively familiar with the area and its developmental needs, she was not very sure how open the villagers would be to her idea. But she got lucky when she met Kunwar Singh, Deepak and Lalit - a group of enterprising local youths who run a school in the area.

Over innumerable cups of sweetened milk tea, and countless rounds of talks, the project started taking shape.

The first challenge was to find traditional Garhwali houses that would, with some investment from SaveAGram's funds, give tourists a truly genuine but comfortable experience.

"There were to be no compromises on that," says Ms Menon. At the same time, it was important for her to focus on households that were really poor and needed the extra income.

But identifying the right dwellings was one thing; convincing the villagers to participate was quite another. They would be enthusiastic initially, but would then back off for obscure reasons.

Once it was due to neighbours teasing them about their wives having to serve food to foreigners. In another instance, the stumbling block was a toilet.

"The first house I decided to take fell through because the home owner wanted to use the new Western-style bathroom I was going to build. A regular income was not as important to him as using a new Western bathroom.

When I said he couldn't use it and I would keep it locked he felt insulted," recounts Ms Menon.

That wasn't all. The hardworking women of the area saw the responsibility of catering to tourists as an additional burden and were apprehensive about the problems that they might face.

"We had to explain to them that their workload wouldn't really increase as the travellers wanted to experience and live their life for a few days. The same food, the same household chores and the same timetable - nothing out of their ordinary day was expected of them.

Once, we managed to persuade the women and convinced them of the added income, the project became much easier to handle," says Ms Menon.

After nearly one year of intense efforts, the villagers finally accepted SaveAGram and were willing to share their homes and hearths with outsiders. The initial seed money for the project came from Ms Menon's own savings.

The first guests arrived in May this year, spending a total of five days in mud-walled, wooden-roofed, simple-but-clean rooms, surrounded by majestic mountains and green fields.

Singaporeans Lata and Balachandran were bowled over by the experience.

"We were pleasantly surprised that every ingredient in our meals - from the Mandve roti (bread) to the onions, ginger, beans, potatoes, turmeric, cumin and coriander - was freshly bought from the fields," says the couple who also live in Chennai.

It was an unforgettable journey they would love to relive again. The couple who arrived in September this year feel they would like to make this an annual visit. "When can you experience this kind of living?" they exclaimed.

But Ms Menon had expected nothing less.

"Once the visitors to the villages wake up to the sweeping views of the Himalayas, taste a diet of organic, non-genetically modified produce, enjoy the beauty of the gurgling rivers and streams in the backyards and breathe in the unhurried pace of life, all served with the 'Our guest is our God' mantra of the villagers, I knew that they would be coming back again and again," she says.

Early success has given Ms Menon, now a Singapore citizen, the confidence to take SaveAGram to other parts, starting perhaps with her home state of Kerala - God's own country.

"Anybody who has been to Kerala will agree that it is beautiful," says the proud Keralite, who has a degree in economics and commerce from Calicut University and a master's degree from St John's University in York.

"The true beauty of Kerala lies in areas like Wyanad or in the coastal villages. Staying in traditional houses, experiencing the everyday life of the common man and just taking a breather from harsh city life, this is what SaveAGram plans to offer its travellers."

The pride Europe takes in its villages convinces Ms Menon that SaveAGram is an idea worth spreading. All the three elements that make social enterprise succeed - a desire for impact, a sense of adventure, and the will to change - have found a "happy intersection" in SaveAGram, she says.

The once-reluctant entrepreneur has already come some way, and is looking to go much farther.

tabla@sph.com.sg


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