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| interview |
february 2017
|
magis
09
|
Shubha Ramachandran
Water sustainability consultant,
Biome Environment Solutions
What is the level of
awareness about wa-
ter management?
A lot of individuals approach
us to design proper water
management systems at their
homes, they are the regular
clients for us so to say. A part
of it is due to awareness and
also because Bengaluru now
has a policy where individuals
are required to adopt rainwater
harvesting. Number of requests
has also gone up because of
water shortage.
Cities you have been
getting requests for
water management
solutions.
We have been getting requests
from cities like Ranchi, Patna,
Tripura. Tripura even after
being a heavy rainfall area is
facing water scarcity. It is only
when people face water short-
age problem they start taking
interest in water harvesting.
Biome Environment
Solutions also
works on environ-
ment sustainable
buildings. Can you
elaborate?
Generally it is seen that
when a house is constructed the
material required comes from
a far off place and nothing
comes out from the plot itself.
The bricks used are dried by
burning wood which costs cut-
ting down of trees and adding
carbon to the environment.
Then again even cement comes
at a high ecological cost. So
our idea is to use the material
from the plot and keep it as
local as possible. Our buildings
come up from the basement, so
the soil excavated is used for
making bricks which are dried
using solar energy. Plastering
using cement is kept only to
bare minimum. Rainwater har-
vesting, waste water treatment,
composting, natural sunlight,
solar panel and other amenities
that keep you off the grid are
part of the design.
go to a person whose income is 10 times
less than ours for financial advice because
we believe that only those who have
made money can advise us better. So the
challenge was how many bank managers
would listen to my colleagues who were
not financially strong. That is a challenge
I still face, so unless you break those chal-
lenges you cannot truly create a sustain-
able society.
challenges of keeping a
commercial venture with a
social objective afloat?
Let us take the example of a local
kirana
shop some decades back selling umbrel-
las. He has built in the locality to the point
that many of his clients are like family to
him worthy to be invited for his daughter’s
wedding. He has priced his umbrellas un-
der a certain pricing strategy and he would
never increase the price of his umbrellas
even when it is raining hard and people are
desperate to buy one. Because he knows
that this is the community around him and
he has to trade with them when the time
comes. But today it is exactly the oppo-
site. Those
kirana
shops survived because
they balanced commercial viability with
social sustainability. Now that the stock
markets have come up we have convinced
ourselves that those are the only ways of
doing business. We need to go back to the
basics of business and that is business is
always intertwined with society.
How to identifyan entrepre-
neurial project?
The starting point is to start blank and
not go with a pre-conceived notion. One
should begin with articulating a problem.
Ironically today the starting point is the re-
modified solution. Entrepreneurs think of
how phones can be useful for the poor or
how can it be used for poor. They think of
two to three ideas and then they are stuck.
Rather the idea should be to think
how can a problem be solved using a
phone and when that articulation happens
then the ideas develop and things fall
in place.
What should be the moti-
vating mantra for aspiring
entrepreneurs?
Your motivation is to solve the problem.
Today 300 million Indians don’t have
electricity so what can be done and what
is the fastest way of solving the problem.
You create a solution and the fastest way
to achieve success would be if 1000 more
people can replicate your solution. Then
you forget about competition or making
your company better than others. More
open source means more partnership and
faster problem solving. And the important
thing is to stay frustrated, if you are not
frustrated you will not be motivated to
find solutions.