When Abdul Kalam stopped at ‘dhabas’ for tea and experiments

Janjivan Bureau
New delhi: Former President APJ Abdul Kalam often ensured that his motorcade stopped at ‘dhabas’ so that he could get a cup of piping hot tea and conduct an unusual experiment on rural entrepreneurship, during his visits to Uttar Pradesh.
The dhabas or roadside eateries that he chose to stop at were ordinary ones, serving tea in plastic cups to the great man who sat in a plastic chair alongside others.
That was at the time when Srijan Pal Singh, the Lucknow-born IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus had decided to work with Kalam instead of a multinational, thus starting a trend of IIM students sacrificing plum jobs to intern with the former President.
Singh, who was with Kalam during his visits to dhabas, said: “Those visits on the Moradabad-Rampur highway and Azamgarh were part of the plan to know how micro-entrepreneurs operate in India and what value addition can enhance their earning potential.”
He added: “India needs millions of such micro-entrepreneurs at the grassroots level. And we need to find how technology, marketing and quality management can improve such ventures. It is, in many ways, linked to (Kalam’s) goal of ‘providing urban amenities in rural areas’ or PURA as it is promoting self-sufficed job generators.”
The idea, Singh said, emerged from discussions that Kalam had with his team about how the real flavour of India is in its roadside markets.
Singh said such unscheduled stops at dhabas helped establish that the ‘chaiwallah’ too has a management lesson to teach.
“The lesson here is how a grassroots entrepreneur operates as a tea maker, a server, a cashier and a cleaner, all combined in one. It is a lesson of how, in a scarcely accessible place, one can conduct efficient inventory management. And, using shoestring budgets, one conducts marketing in a reasonably competitive space,” he added.
Alongside his visits to dhabas, Kalam also began meeting grassroots innovators and product designers to discover ways to empower India.
This was a great way of learning and understanding grassroots enterprises, a necessary element for planning to empower millions of rural and suburban people, said members of Kalam’s team.
His staff was instructed to ensure that during his visits to smaller cities and rural areas, some time was set aside for interacting with local innovators and researchers. The dhaba experience was part of this.
Inspired by Kalam’s grounded vision for developing the country, the number of IIM graduates wanting to intern with Kalam had steadily risen – from one in 2009 and 2010 to six in 2011. In 2012, the Dr Kalam Foundation received 36 applications from MBAs, of which eight were accepted.

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