‘We need millions of entrepreneurs to unleash India’s power’

Mehmood Khan remembers his childhood in rural India vividly. He is from Nai Nangla village, then in Punjab at the time of his birth in 1954 and now in south Haryana.

He walked two km to a primary school in another village, 3 km for middle school and 4 km for high school. “It was a happy childhood. I was born with plenty around me, though it was a rural setting,” he says.

After graduating in science, Khan went to the IIM-Ahmedabad, where he worked with Prof. Mathai, who was the first full-time director of the institute, on experiments on education innovation, from 1975 to 1977. Then Khan joined another social entrepreneur Manibhai Desai, who did a lot for rural development, especially in dairy farming.

It is this early experience in working in villages that is now helping Khan as a social entrepreneur, as he uses his corporate network to improve the living standards in the rural area, including his native village.

Co-operative movement

After a stint with Manibhai Desai, Khan was involved in the co-operative movement in Punjab.

“Then Unilever seduced me,” says Khan. He helped establish Unilever’s businesses in places such as Vietnam and the whole of East Asia.

This was followed by a stint at London as leader of global innovation for Unilever.

It was during his stint in the multinational from 1982 to 2009 that Khan also set up a pan-IIM network and was its founder-president.

“While I was in that capacity I was contacted by some of the people who were involved in education in India. Through that process I got involved in rural India, first in education and now employment. I am basically creating enterprises at the grassroots level,” says Khan.

Khan has leveraged his extensive contacts in the corporate world as well as alumni of the IIMs to provide education in the villages, basic literacy for women, computer training, provide clean drinking water and employment. “What we are trying to do is using green technologies to remove poverty, by using entrepreneurship as the vehicle.”

According to Khan, apart from his native village, he is involved in projects in Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh and western Rajasthan.

Khan, who is also the Managing Trustee of the Rasuli Kanwar Khan Trust, is also using the trust in his social entrepreneurship initiatives.

New concepts

He talks of new management concepts such as imagination, experimentation, co-creation and collaboration for education and job creation.

Imagination is in turning the ideas the rural people have into self-sustaining enterprises; experimentation is in developing a small prototype and trying it out; co-creation is in working with the farmers; and, collaboration is in bringing domain experts in various areas to work with the rural population.

“We work with farmers. We have to create millions of entrepreneurs to unleash India’s power,” says Khan.

Ask him about his biggest challenge as a social entrepreneur and Khan’s reply echoes almost what every other employer faces. “

It is basically retaining talent in rural India. The talent movement is all one way, moving to the cities,” says Khan.

Even with meagre income, the rural people do not want free education. They want the right education for their children, says Khan.

He himself was a product of a government school, he points out, but now nobody wants to study in a government school.

Nearly half the schools in the rural areas too are private schools.

“I don’t carry a business card. I work in the villages. My only global address is my email and phone,” says Khan.

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