Breaking the Mould: Niche Entrepreneurship

Some weeks ago, a reporting assignment took me to Malegaon, a village in Baramati, which lies about 99-100 kilometers outside Pune city. My destination was an emu farm, Bhagirathi Hatcheries, in Malegaon, one of the first in the state of Maharashtra. Sandip Sadashiv Taware, the owner of Bhagirathi Hatcheries, used to be a poultry (chicken) farmer who turned to emu farming in 2001 when profits in chicken farming dipped. He is one of about 300 farmers in Maharashtra today who depend on this ostrich-like bird for their livelihood.

Looking at a live emu there is no way I would curry it in my kitchen. It is possibly the ugliest bird I have ever seen, though it also happens to be quite friendly and rather curious about sports shoes — a gang of four of those tall (about five feet each) blue-necked creatures eyed me quizzically for half a minute and then proceeded to inspect my already frayed sneakers with their do-not-mess-with-me beaks for a full eight minutes.

No, I don’t see myself grabbing an emu tandoori leg in a hurry (it is supposed to be one of many delicacies) — and that would be one big tandoori leg, about a foot at least — but selling emu meat is a growing and profitable business for Taware and his ilk. He turned in profits of Rs 10 lakh this March and is now working up even bigger plans, among them emu tourism and a cooperative meat processing factory for Maharashtra’s emu farmers.

I have not met a lot of farmers, I must admit, but could not help marveling at Taware. In typical city-slicker fashion I had not taken my laptop along because I thought, “Baramati, umm…village…no Internet.” And there was Taware, when I walked into his office after a jaunt around the emu enclosure, talking to his business partner about what price to quote on eBay for carved emu eggs — the shells of the eggs that do not yield chicks are hand-carved and sold. “No waste, everything can be recycled,” he explained before handing out a visiting card made from recycled paper. Baramati, the town, happens to be all wired-up thanks to WiFi and much of the district is also well connected.

Next time outside Bombay city limits, I will pack in less ignorance and more humility.

Read the latest Outlook Business cover package on niche businesses such as emu farming and sewage cleaning. These are the stories of 12 entrepreneurs who chose to start up in some very unconventional businesses. They are not quite the ‘glamourous’ Web 2.0 and technology startups usually featured on this blog, but have an equally, if not more important, role to play in the development of emerging India.