Kuldip Maity

Wallets are no longer in your pocket! Wallets are now in the digital space, in the form of an icon on your smartphone’s screen. Just load it with cash digitally or link it to your bank account, and you are all set to go. Pay from it and receive payment into it as you would have with your physical cash and bulging wallets.

Now wonder about this. Who could have thought that one could send money to anyone just like the way one sends email? All you need to know is the payee’s mobile number and whether that is linked digitally to his account. And then write the phone number or the UPI identification and transfer the amount desired instantly. OTP (for one-time password) is an acronym that every mobile telephone user knows.

Contrast this with the era of writing cheques. It does look archaic by today’s standard, but cheques were the earliest form of cashless transaction. You would carry the chequebook, and instead of paying cash, you would write the cheque in favour of the payee, who would have to go to a bank to cash it or deposit it at his bank and wait three days for the money to come in.

But smartphones are making the world of digital cash rock with new systems every other day. So much so that there is now talk of giving a voice command to your smartphone to transfer money. And then, of course, there are cryptocurrencies, an invention entirely of internet world —a payment mode that works like money yet is not money as we know it.

Or, take NFC or near-field communication. Two mobile phones with this technology can connect once they are within range, even without physical contact. Now think about this. Your debit or credit card no longer needs to be swiped on the point-of-sale machine. Just hold it over the PoS machine, and the payment goes through. No physical touch or pushing buttons.

Now, with the NFC-enabled payment system, even debit or credit cards could become archaic. Just install the NFC-enabled payment app on your smartphone, take it near an NFC-enabled PoS machine, and your payment will be through.

There is talk of a voice-activated payment system. With this technology, all that you need to do is to speak into your phone. The app scans your voice and the payment, instructed through voice again, would complete the process!

It looks like anybody with an internet space wants to be an agent or payment facilitator. Even social media does not want to be left behind. Check out WhatsApp. If your account is UPI enabled, you can use WhatsApp to send money to your chat buddy. Even five years back, nobody could think about such a facility built into a social media app!

But despite the excitement over such technologies making transactions easier, India is far from becoming a digital country. Worldwide, China, the USA and the UK are said to lead the pack in digital payment technologies. Such such payments require access to a bank account and a smartphone.

We seem to be taking cautious steps as it also requires safeguarding against cyber fraud. But India is making fast strides towards an economy to be largely ruled by cashless transactions.

The radio and television had been transmitting the cyclone alert for the last three days. Soma was busy stocking the temporary coop behind the house with bird grains. The 25-year-old mother of two was anxious and scared for her family and her home. A cyclone was about to come, pass through the rolling greens of Nadia, unleashing its fury on her village of Narayanpur and leave a trail of destruction. She packed some muri or puffed rice, some chirey or beaten rice and left with her husband and her children for the nearby Amphan relief shelter, the Nadia Madrassa.

Two years ago, Soma Bibi Mian had started her poultry business with a loan from Village Financial Services. Since then, it had been the family’s blanket of financial security. With time her coop of hens and chickens grew, and so did her business. From rice-eating ceremonies to weddings to funerals, Soma’s chicken was on every plate. So were the eggs.

Soma’s family and a dozen others made the school building their home for the next few days as the cyclone arrived and left.

Soma’s sincere faith in her prayers had shielded her house from major damage, but her coop had been flattened. None of its inhabitants was alive. As relief started arriving, Soma went back to her home. The children were happy to return to their neighbourhood. Her husband went around the house assessing the damages. Soma went into the backyard and saw the coop destroyed, the chickens dead.

Soma could see only dark clouds. Every time she looked at the flattened coop, her eyes filled with tears. She decided to concede defeat and give up her dream. Her husband and children tried their best to motivate her, but they failed. Days passed, Soma returned to the local VFS branch to declare her departure. She was standing at the very place where she had come two years ago with dreams for her family’s prosperity.

Something struck in her. Standing at the door, Soma recalled her days of hard work in building her prosperous hatchery. She remembered the morning she found the first egg laid in her coop. The children had run to her as their mother shouted in glee. She remembered the day of her first sale. It was the homecoming of her neighbour’s daughter from medical college. The proud mother of the new doctor had complimented Soma about the tasty eggs.

She realised that failure comes easy; winning is hard. Her memories of the flourishing coop would not let her rest in peace. She returned to her empty coop, fixed it, cleaned it, and got it ready for a new tenant. The next day, she returned home from the town market with the coop’s new inhabitants. She was ready to retrace her days of starting the poultry. Her children and her husband rejoiced over her decision.

Within a few months, she had regained her lost momentum and her old customers. She earned new customers for her eggs at the local weekly bazaar. Her husband helped her spread the word of her business. As the village started to recover from Amphan, the residents started to get back into their groove. Soma’s neighbours went back to their work. The season of weddings arrived yet again, and Soma made sure to make the most of it.

As the profits started coming in, Soma realised the merit of her decision while standing at the gate of the VFS branch office after Amphan. Her second innings was bearing more fruit than her first. This time she was armed with the knowledge of handling a poultry business.

While speaking to VFS executives, Soma narrated every small aspect of her journey. She wanted to make sure that the message we received was loud and clear: We all deserve a second chance in life. If that fails, then a third. But not acceptance of defeat.

As India continues to combat the COVID-19 pandemic with “Made in India” vaccines, it is worth realizing the need to continue following safety protocols. Not just for yourself but for the survival of every individual.

The rise in cases has brought back worries about the future. How well will the cogs of this huge economy move towards recovery?

Last week, the International Monetary Fund’s chief economist, Gita Gopinath, said there is evidence of normalization of the Indian economy. (She added that the numbers preceded the current wave of the virus.) The IMF projected a strong growth of 12.5 per cent. The Reserve Bank of India’s governor, Shaktikanta Das, said the current year’s GDP growth forecast is being retained at 10.5 per cent.

But one must realize that this projection and forecast can come true only when the right efforts are put in the right direction. Our ways of doing business will have to adapt to the growing challenges and become more flexible. Our focus should be to prioritize immediate needs and solve them with the resources available.

The steps need to be taken surely, but steadily. This philosophy of “taking one day at a time” is well expressed in VFS customer Asmita Barman’s experience. Tucked amidst the greenery of West Tripura is the village of Ishanpur. Asmita is one of the residents of the quaint village. She started her journey with VFS over a year ago. From dawn to dusk, Asmita ekes a farmer’s living on a field next to her village. With the financial support from VFS, she got hold of high-yielding seeds of tomatoes. From the next village, she got agricultural supplements. With the resources ready, Asmita and her family plant the seeds. Once the produce was harvested, her father-in-law helped her with sales in the nearby markets.

Just when things were finally looking up, the Union government announced the lockdown towards the end of March 2020. Markets were closed, and people were told to stay indoors. Asmita’s dreams got trapped in the darkness of her small home. Although farmers were free to continue tending to their fields, sales slumped, and Asmita’s dreams of financial stability were pushed to the brink. She realized she would have to change her ways of doing business to cope with the challenge. When the first “unlock” was announced, Asmita travelled to the next village and invested in various seasonal vegetables.

Rays of hope started piercing the clouds of darkness. Her field threw up a good harvest of vegetables. Asmita was able to outperform her competitors in the market with a vegetable stall that resembled a rainbow assortment of vegetables.

Asmita harbours dreams of a good life for her three-year-old daughter. The toddler missed her first experience of nursery school because schools were shut. But Asmita is patiently waiting for her daughter’s school to reopen. Asmita had been unable to continue studies after high school because her family was poor. But the setback failed to quench her ambition to be an entrepreneur. Starting young, Asmita had learnt the lesson of embracing challenges and navigating her way through them.

The year 2020 was a test of that very lesson for all of us.

Asmita told the VFS executive her plans to expand with her family’s support and assistance from VFS. Now, the experienced and weathered entrepreneur was armed with insights of how to pitch her efforts in the right direction.

Change, as they say, is the only constant. While it’s true in every sphere of life, it’s truer in the case of a business. A change in customer preference, a minor tweak in the regulatory environment, a new substitute product or even an efficient employee’s departure (especially in a small business) may create an insurmountable challenge for an entrepreneur. Running a business means a process of continuous adaptation to deal with changes and changing one’s ways accordingly.

The adaptation factor could be reactive or active or a mix of both. Those who are adept at both survive the most. Let us look into what is involved here. Take the case of an entrepreneur who is reactive. A reactive business doesn’t initiate a change in the marketplace. The strategy here is to wait for the change to happen and, once that takes place, the business strategy seeks to adapt to the change. The process, therefore, is not anticipatory. The business risk here lies in being caught unawares perpetually. Those who seek to change only when a change is demanded from them face the risk of losing out to the competitors.

Let’s take the example of land acquisition. If you have a shop on land that you know may be acquired for development, the smartest move would be to seek a place ahead of the take-over where you can enjoy a locational advantage. But if you wait for the resettlement process to start, you may not get a location that would provide you even the advantage you enjoy at your current location.

You may wake up one day to find that the business neighbour and your competitor has booked a place that provides him with a competitive advantage that could have been yours had you decided to be an active adaptor. Being a reactive agent, you will have to reinvent the wheel of success in an allotted space. The space will be an external condition that you will have to accept and redraw your survival strategy.

A successful business strategy focuses not on surviving just ‘now’ but, on the contrary, it takes the present as a condition and leverages that to secure the future. They call this ‘staying future-safe’. In our example, if the person acts on the rumour and actively searches for another location, he is leveraging his current condition to insure himself against a possible regulatory threat.

It’s a win-win situation for him. If the acquisition doesn’t happen, he wins with an expanded business. If it comes through, he also wins with a protected, if not a better, location. In the new plot, if the location is not good for the business he used to do, he will not be a loser. He has a better place elsewhere that would provide him with the chance to think through and come up with a plan to use the government allotted plot profitably.

A reactive adapter has the disadvantage of being a laggard or a follower. A temperamentally future-safe adapter, on the other hand, would always have the advantage of staying ahead. He wouldn’t wait for the market to tell him to diversify. He would always seek to create product differentiation and strive to dictate his customer preference. He wouldn’t ride the product life-cycle; he would strive to dictate the product life cycle.

How and what would obviously depend on the nature of the business concerned but the hallmark of all survivors in business is staying ‘future safe’ by realizing that change is the only constant.

“One man’s nightmare is another man’s dream” — Rupert Hine

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced the government to announce a lockdown on an economy expanding and growing to become self-reliant. Overnight, people learned the “new normal”—the three-ply masks, the sanitizer with more than 80% alcohol content, the 20-second rule of washing hands and most importantly, physical distance. Our mobile caller tunes now kept on reminding the necessity of do gaj doori or the need to maintain a physical distance of six feet from others. While most of us counted days, battling thoughts of a bleak future, from the comfort of our homes with a cushion of financial security, to many even meeting the basic financial needs seemed like a luxury.

Nasima Bibi had just returned from her niece’s wedding when the first phase of the lockdown was announced. As a mother of three, she realized that her family and everyone in her village needed to comply with the COVID-19 precautions.

At the village of Panikal, ten years ago, Nasima had started her business of readymade clothes. Her journey with VFS started two years ago when she realized her potential to grow and expand her manufacturing unit. Her backyard had transformed into a small hub of readymade clothes, with a couple of local tailors.

From Panikal, her clothes travelled beyond district and state borders for sale. Nasima looked forward to the wedding and festive seasons when the demand would go high, and her employees worked day and night to meet them. It was a blissful moment for both Nasima and her tailors.

By February, Nasima’s favourite niece was ready to get married. Her entire family had come down to their maternal home for the celebrations. Nasima and her niece beamed with joy over the handmade saree the aunt had made for the wedding. No one in the wedding party in the remote village of Bengal’s Hooghly district had anticipated the unprecedented lockdown. For most of them, the term ‘coronavirus’ was alien, so was the reality.

Nasima was unpacking her luggage when the radio from the neighbour’s window blared the lockdown news.

Over the next few days, health officers visited their village with the awareness campaign. Isolation wards were prepared in the local hospital. Nasima asked her employees to maintain all protocol and not come for their work until the lockdown was lifted.

Those months were the hardest for Nasima and her family. She worried that her kids would suffer from the gap in their education. She could not predict the financial losses facing her business, adding to the tension.

It was hard for her to see her manufacturing hub silent. But she had to put aside her worries and keep her hopes alive. There was no option.

When the government announced Unlock 1, her backyard came back to life. Work gained momentum, and sales picked up ahead of the Durga Puja festival, although they were nowhere near the 2019 numbers. VFS’s executives reached her village branch. Nasima learned to tide over the setback with the awareness training they gave and move into the New Year with new ambition.

Communication has been the key to success in these trying times.

Since the unlock, VFS executives have been making phone calls to stay in touch with our customers. On all fronts, VFS has been making constant efforts to establish an effective chain of communication with our customers while prioritizing their health and their family’s wellbeing.

Last week, when VFS called Nasima, she was discussing the production model with her tailors for the Bengali New Year and Ramadan. When she was asked about her current situation, Nasima replied, “Much better”. We could almost see her smile over the phone.

Nasima’s story is a story of hope—keeping the faith alive even when the lights are out. Her confidence in herself and her faith in the Almighty kept her spirit going. Her story questions our perspective on setbacks and the way we treat them.

Whether we make it a dream or a nightmare—it’s up to us.