By Patricia Mukhim
This article is an attempt to discuss something that very few dare to share. Failure and how to cope with it. It is the result of a programme I attended at the Bosco Institute, Jorhat, Assam which offers a Masters Course in Social Work and is also an incubation hub for young entrepreneurs. According to Fr Jerry Thomas the founder-director of the Institution, the aim is to retain human capital from the North Eastern Region within the region instead of pushing them to look for jobs in unfriendly environs outside the region where they face racial discrimination and are stereotyped as being good only for working at salons or the hospitality industry. The North East is rich in natural resources but its human resources have not been developed to use those resources in a sustainable manner without reckless exploitation.
The Meghalaya Government has been promoting entrepreneurs and their start-ups but one wonders whether those young and budding entrepreneurs have enough hands-on training, mentoring and counselling to withstand the rigours of the trade. There is so much to know about the world of business such as conducting market surveys to find out what the market demand is. A young lady entrepreneur Fatima Bint Mazid while in a conversation said she and her husband one day during the Covid period had this dream of starting a business dealing with jute bags. While she tried to manage the materials such as buying the first 25 metres of jute from Kolkata and a machine to stitch the bags and then design them, her husband was exploring markets. They tried to sell their products through Amazon and Flipkart but found the commission too high. Later they sold the bags through India Mart and then got orders from Starbucks and other bigger brands. And their journey was made but they had to constantly innovate to make their product better. For the initial investment Fatima and her mother-in-law had to take a loan against gold ornaments. And that is the crux of the matter! What happens if one has no collateral to offer?
Commercial banks offer loans to those who already run businesses and would not invest in a brand new entrepreneur in case the business fails. And yet it is the entrepreneur who is most in need of seed money. The Meghalaya Government has promoted quite a number of entrepreneurs with seed money. Four or five years down the line it is important to find out if those who have availed the seed money are progressing on the right track and have expanded their businesses and how many have dropped out due to failure to run the business.
A gentleman by name YR Wilson Maria Doss who had a Masters Degree in Social Work and a management degree from IIM Calcutta and was working for a corporate firm as a Human Resource (HR) personnel shared his amazing story. Wilson had a sudden calling to step out of a well -paying corporate job and to become an entrepreneur. He set up a departmental store but before long another more swanky store selling the same stuff came up next to his and he started losing business. By the time he could salvage the business he had lost 10 crore rupees and the banks and other debtors were after his life. At the time his children were still studying and they asked their father why he took such a reckless decision to quit a secure job. Wilson went into depression and was hospitalised in Bangalore. After due treatment he found his feet and went back to the corporate world where he was offered a job. Now both his children and son and daughter are well-placed professionals in the US. The lesson that Wilson was trying to drive at while addressing the bright young women entrepreneurs who had gathered at the Bosco Hub for the 7th North East Vent which is an annual gathering of entrepreneurs who have received their training from there.
Speaking to me earlier that day, Wilson said that the biggest shock for any entrepreneur is to fail at the business because no one has taught us how to cope with failure. This is so true. We are taught many things from books but there is no school or college book and nor are there teachers who can mentor students to cope with failure and what the coping mechanisms are. Many entrepreneurs who fall by the wayside are never able to pick up the threads. It is in this context that Wilson Maria Doss’s experience is a great learning for all entrepreneurs.
On another note it is also important to deeply analyse how disconnected our education has been from our ecosystem. It has never taught us the importance of value addition but has made us sell out everything in their raw form. Look at the hundreds of trucks selling limestone to Bangladesh instead of adding value through properly run cement companies that could have created employment for so many youth. In fact, value addition of raw products, sourced from our land is what entrepreneurship is all about. But the expertise for value addition can only come about if the youth are mentored and learn both about success and also failure.
Wilson told the young start-up owners who displayed their wares at the Bosco Incubation Hub that entrepreneurship is a vocation and it needs passion because one is responsible for how the start-up runs. There is no easy route, he said and an entrepreneur has no choice but to wake up at 4 am and start working. It’s not an easy job but if the start-up succeeds it can offer jobs to many others and that in itself should trigger many more youth to actually become entrepreneurs since the job market in the government sector is in a state of drought.
What is heartening about the Bosco Institute is that there is a mix of students from the North East including about 7 from Meghalaya (quite a few from Ri Bhoi district) who are doing their Masters in Social Work (under Dibrugarh University) but they are very grounded and have outreach programmes such as organising communities around issues which is what Social Work as a subject is all about. Many of these students then step into the world of work with a range of practical lessons in their kits.
The Bosco Institute has an innovation centre called a Makers Room – It says there, “Making is the process of cutting and joining materials and giving it a final finishing.” Here anyone with an idea of designing and making anything is free to come and try to design anything and get those printed in a 3-D printer.
One witnessed first hand how education is tuned to the real world needs and is not just dry and boring academics and the students seem to enjoy their time at the Institute. They do stuff late into the night and can be heard making noise but that’s what learning is all about.
Fr Jerry Thomas says, “The institute aims at grooming young people into confident, competent and passionate professionals who would be harbingers of positive change at the individual, community and at the larger societal level. But he is also aware that mental health is something that can assault anyone at any time especially when young people or even their teachers and the entrepreneurs in the Hub are under stress. So the Institute has a beautiful building of a single room with a pool that makes a soothing sound to heal the mind. People who need healing come there to just talk and there is someone to listen to them. Just listen..because listening itself is a healing process.
With so many mentors coming to the Institute from time to time the students are exposed to the best minds. Like Wilson said, “Everything begins in the mind and that directs the body. If the mind says something will fail people are automatically led to that path of failure unless someone catches hold of them at a critical juncture and pulls them back from that downward journey. To me that is real education. It is an education that brings out the best in every individual and which has created an ambiance where collaboration and solidarity building around issues comes naturally.
PRIME Meghalaya has never publicly shared as to how many entrepreneurs it has incubated so far and whether all of them have succeeded. There is nothing wrong with failure provided there’s someone to help pull the person out of the abyss. Perhaps the Meghalaya Basin Management Authority (MBMA) could be more open about sharing its experiences over the years and how successful its endeavour has been to create entrepreneurs.
As a society we are too gung-ho about politics and society and even the many write-ups appearing here don’t really give us an insight into what really drives our youth and if there are role models that have beaten all odds to succeed in scaling up their businesses. It is in sharing stories that we build up one another.
