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She also shares that imbibing the conservation
mindset is not as easy as it sounds. ‘Conservation is a
nebulous concept for most people. Almost everybody
wants to see a ‘good’ person when they look in the
mirror. The catch is, few want to extend themselves
or suffer any change for it. So as conservation
proponents, our job really is to enable participation,
make it really easy and zero effort for people to commit
and contribute to a conservation mindset.’ And just
because a business is eco-friendly doesn’t mean that
there can be compromises on quality. ‘For those of us
in the business of selling, the primary motivator for
a person to spend, must be the product – unless the
product is absolutely fantastic, the source story lacks
shelf life. So, at Elrhino, we’re always saying – people
need to buy our products because they are fantastic.
The fact that they are also sustainable and leading to
the greater good – that is the icing on the cake. It’s a
win-win.’Entrepreneurship in NE
Having experienced the effort it takes to build a
company and run it successfully, Nisha shares that
the region still lacks in a lot of ways when it comes to
supporting entrepreneurship. ‘The Northeast suffers
from a historical deprivation of local private enterprise;
this manifests in a very fragile ecosystem for us – we
are constantly scrambling for people, accessories,
printers, well informed bank managers etc. It isn’t that
these resources don’t exist in the region; they do, but
the quality bar is so low that we are unable to produce
goods for the international market. While we are
highly committed to keeping the work within Assam,
I find myself compelled, quite often, to outsource
some of the more high stakes jobs to partners in the
rest of the country. The government really does need
to consider how it might finance (and support with
capacity building) small businesses who have the
ambition to do world class work. Why should a high
end screen printing machine, available in Mumbai, be
unavailable across the entire Northeast, for instance?
There is also the sheer distance that creates a massive
cost overhead – the cost of transportation of goods
out of the Northeast is extremely high, and chips
away at our competitiveness. On top of that, internet
technology is not yet being leveraged by government
and public sector – so there continues to be greater
corruption and extreme inefficiency in several of our
dealings.’
She adds, ‘Very few of our youth have an appetite
for business risk yet. While ‘entrepreneurship’ isclearly the buzz word, there are very many firmly
entrenched inhibitors. This impacts somebody like us
because finding, retaining and grooming management
talent is extremely tough.’