The year 2020 was nothing short of a nightmare for business owners. Starting from owners of small and medium-sized businesses to large corporate houses, the COVID19 lockdowns spared none.

Yes, it was a nightmare, the one that our mothers or grandmothers used to tell us to make us shut our eyelids and fall asleep. But every night has an ending. It ends with the rising sun. When the first rays of the sun hit the soil, there is hope for a new lease of life.

With the end of the second wave of COVID-19, the outlook for most people changed completely. The pandemic had reminded us about the fleeting seconds of life. The vulnerability of our tomorrows. The existential crises, perhaps, pinched us more, coupled with the financial crises.

Every crisis forces us to act. Many were forced to re-imagine their lives, their decisions, their choices.

This was the birth of hope. As most business owners started to reconstruct their ways of doing business, many employees, workers and other stakeholders were also forced to go through the same route of decision-making. Many chose to stop being an employee and turn an entrepreneur.

Champa Rani Roy, a resident of a small village of Dansi, Dharmatala, was working in a handicraft manufacturing unit. Her work was to decorate different types of garments with glittering embroidery. Mother of a 14-year-old, Champa’s dreams were humble. She wanted a comfortable life for her family and a healthy future for her son. Her husband is a factory worker.

Life had its usual ups and downs, but the Roy family weathered them all with ease. But the March of 2020 turned their lives upside and down. During the lockdown, both Champa and her husband lost their jobs. Champa felt that the entire sky collapsed over her head. With just a few hundred rupees in her purse, she looked outside her window...

Fast forward to June 2021.

There is a long queue outside Champa’s house. Everyone is following the COVID19 distancing protocols. Each person is standing inside a circle made of chalk sticks. When one of the VFS executives went to her house, this was the scene he saw from a distance. A grocer now, Champa was busy attending to the customers. There was not a second to be spared for a breather. The VFS executive had to wait an hour before he could manage to take her interview. It was worth the wait.

Over a cup of tea, Champa began to narrate her journey from unemployment to entrepreneurship, from financial crisis to financial stability...

...with those few hundred rupees, Champa walked to the nearest grocery store. It was in the next village. The lockdown had eased, a few stores had opened, a few hadn’t. Champa took a note of the ones that were open for business and the ones that didn’t.

An idea started to take shape. What would happen if she could open her own grocery? But where would the money come from?

She met a grocery store owner and asked her how she had started. “I took a loan from VFS,” the shopkeeper replied. Champa took down the address of the nearby VFS branch and the process of taking a loan. She joined a joint liability group, Diya, where a group of women from her village had come together to take charge of their financial growth. The next thing was to apply for a loan. In a few days, Champa was one of VFS’s aspiring customers. With the capital in hand, she converted the spare room in her house into a grocery.

Since then, Champa never had to turn back to the days of darkness. For her, the grocery became her rising Sun. It was the birth of an entrepreneur.