BANGALORE: Sweta Tiwari, who will soon get her MBA degree in finance from Thakur Institute of Management, made chocolates on Valentine’s day which
fetched her Rs 20,000 in just three days. Interestingly, she earned Rs 22,000 while test marketing her products — the highest earned by any student in her 180-batch class. She plans to open a retail outlet and aims it to be a Rs 100-crore company in five years.
It’s just not IIM graduates who are taking the entrepreneurial plunge. Students from tier-1 and tier-2 management institutes are also increasingly joining the entrepreneurial tribe and their businesses range from making solar streetlights, robots, solar mobile chargers, painting murals and walls, mushroom cultivation, making eco-bricks out of cow dung to offering homemade tiffins.
Sweta was among the 6 lakh students from business schools and engineering colleges across 30 cities who participated in Entrepreneurship Week (E-Week) India conducted by the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN) this year. “We saw the number of business propositions and the number of participants double compared to last year,” said Laura A Parkin, executive director, NEN, and Wadhwani Foundation, which supports E-Week.
One of the aspirants was Danny D’Cruz from the VLB Janakiammal College of Arts and Science, Coimbatore. He started a wall and mural painting business, taking up an average of four projects a month, which helped him earn Rs 8,000 per project. D’Cruz started this business when one of his artist friends lost his BPO job during the recession. “We go to houses and paint their walls with different pictures as per customer demand,” says D’Cruz.
Students like Praveen Kumar and Ashwin Dange from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore, who learnt about the shortage of mushroom supply in Mysore, started cultivating it. They plan to brand their products soon and sell them directly to hotels and restaurants. And Ashutosh Pandey (25) from the Thakur Institute of Management in Mumbai plans to launch a startup that offers homemade tiffins along with four fellow students. “We hope to sell 1,000 tiffins per day after six months,” said Mr Pandey.
G Ramachandran (22), a Btech final year student at the PSG Institute of Technology, has plans to launch solar streetlights and solar mobile chargers. He plans to raise funds by conducting workshops on solar robots.
Going the eco-way is another student, Kumar Saurav, from the Vidya Vardhaka College of Engineering, Mysore, who has plans to make eco-bricks made of cow dung for homes. These bricks are a mix of cow dung, silica and clay which can be baked in sunlight and don’t need kilns or large ovens. Mr Saurav is talking to contractors and the construction industry to supply these bricks. “With an investment of Rs 50,000, I am planning to produce 20,000 bricks to do a trial run,” he said.
Rahul Kamath (24) from PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore has started a company which makes steam boilers used for different industries instead of furnaces.
“The steam has got higher temperature than fire and can be used for different purposes such as cleaning and won’t burn objects,” he said. Mr Kamath is also starting a plant for organic fuel sourced from agricultural waste, with an investment of Rs 5 lakh.
