Parents can do anything to ensure that their children prosper when they grow up. They may even dare to turn to business.
Pinky Rani tells you how. Her son is 10 years old. He is visually impaired. He cannot speak more than ‘ma’ or a few other monosyllables. He cannot hear either.
But the mother’s eyes sparkle with energy and confidence, as she is ready with a business plan for him and 84 other children with multiple disabilities. Her plan includes supply of paper bags and paper cups.
This requires machines that can give her the volumes to make the business viable. Such a machine may cost up to Rs 20 lakh.
Pinky and the 84 mothers in the parents’ organisation, Athak Prayas Sansthan, of Delhi, will now submit their proposal to the National Trust, a statutory body under the Union Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, set up under the National Trust for the Welfare of Persons with Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Mental Retardation and Multiple Disabilities Act.
The trust — in partnership with Arunim, a marketing arm of the trust, and the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC), set up under the Prime Ministers’s National Council on Skill Development — has launched E 3 Challenge, a scheme to create entrepreneurs. The ‘E’s stands for Economic Enterprise and Empowerment. It is an entrepreneurship development contest, where the best will be chosen and nurtured for four to five years, till they become profit-making enterprises, says Arunim MD Thilakam Rajenderan.
But what about the rest of about 200 applications? Trust Chairman Poonam Natarajan says the mere expression of interest is enough for any NGO or parent body to come in the fold of the mentoring exercise that the trust, along with its partners, is going to provide in terms of design, marketing and funding. NSDC is meant to do that, she adds.
The idea is to take the disability organisations beyond training and rehabilitation and make them profit-making entities, say Rajendran and Natarajan, both veterans in the sector.
Rajendran has been associated with disability group Aadi for decades, while Natarajan, herself the mother of a child with cerebral palsy, founded NGO Vidyasagar, which started as a teaching school for three kids in a car shed and today caters to 2,000 children with multiple disabilities.
We have done with training and rehabilitation, says Natarajan, who used to run six micro enterprises at Vidyasagar earlier. It used to be a harrowing experience finding markets for the products, she recalls. A rare occasion when she got bulk orders was from Japan for leaf plates, she adds.
That is why we created Arunim and now E3 Challenge. We want the disability organisations to go beyond service and become profit-making business entities.
But, with a corpus of just Rs 1 crore, Arunim is not sufficiently empowered itself to market the produce being sent by 150 of its member NGOs, representing thousands of disabled people.
Last year, Arunim could sell products worth a mere Rs 7 lakh and the target for this year is Rs 25 lakh.
For mothers like Pinky, however, both Arunim and E3 provide hope. Ask her how disabled people can man machines that she plans to install and she says: Did Tatas or Birlas or Ambanis man machines? They employed people to do that.
Thilakam agrees. We are creating businesses here. It could be a factory or a taxi service. The disabled would be shareholders, not drivers. It is about the idea and how you can add value to a product. For example, what one could do to make a painting or an ordinary grass mat look better, he adds.
