I remember that day in the winter of 2011 when a truck carrying our belongings reached Dharamshala. It was the end of January, that time of the year when days are short. It’s a long way from Shimla to Dharamshala, and it was dark by the time we started unloading the truck. Thankfully, it was not raining – quite unlikely for a place like Dharamshala where it rains almost every other day.  

For me, a long journey had come to an end – a journey which had started thirteen years back and had taken me to various parts of India for education and work. Along this journey, I have made many friends, acquaintances and gathered wonderful experiences. However, there was always this thought in the back of my mind that one day, the circle will be complete and I will be back in my hometown. 

While my old journey was now complete, here I was – embarking on a brand new one. Unlike the previous one, where the path was clearly laid out, this one was full of uncertainties. It required me to chart my own course from scratch. Thankfully, I had a partner with me – my wife Shilpa. Even though she had lived all her life in a city, she supported the idea of following an entrepreneurial path in the mountains. 

GreenKrafts – Experiment with a Bamboo Handicrafts Venture 

The first idea that we dabbled in was a bamboo handicraft venture. The Kangra region in Himachal Pradesh has an abundant supply of high-quality bamboo, cane and natural fibers. However, creating items that earned an attractive premium required highly skilled workers. To bridge the skill gap, we set up workshops for local artisans and hired design professionals and trainers. 

But mobilizing the local workforce turned out to be a challenge. Even after several months, our workshops were largely empty. We also realized that to succeed in this market, we would need to have a deep pocket to invest generously in marketing and branding – clearly not something we could afford at that stage.

This way, the first year of our stay in Dharamshala went by, without much financial success coming our way. However, we refused to give up. We truly believed that better days were ahead of us, and as they say – where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Collaboration with Srijan 

Around the beginning of the 2012, I reconnected with an old friend, Rahul Dewan. Rahul is a technology enthusiast and a passionate entrepreneur spearheading Srijan Technologies, a thriving IT firm in New Delhi.

Though I didn’t have a background in tech, Rahul and I seemed to connect  and began to toy with the idea of setting up a software development centre in Dharamshala. The idea of delivering IT from the mountains (where even basic internet connectivity was a challenge) seemed like an exciting prospect, especially since this was happening way back in 2012.

Simultaneously, we also began to look for a senior IT Lead who would spearhead the tech side of things. As luck would have it, I chanced upon Krishnan, an IT veteran with over two decades of experience. An avid mountaineer, he had moved here from Bangalore to live in the mountains. All three of us felt the synergy brewing between us. One thing led to another, and we soon set up a partnership.  

In the initial days, Srijan Technologies provided us with clients as well as 4 Engineers from their team in New Delhi. Within three years, we grew the business and employed a team of 20+ Engineers. Most of them were local hires, who were brought in as interns and groomed them to become world class engineers. While we didn’t clock the kind of exponential growth that is typically sought-after in IT, we fared well considering the lack of talent and resources in a Tier III hill-town like Dharamshala. 

Meanwhile, like me, Shilpa too made a small breakthrough in her career. Her newfound job as a faculty member at a local institute was somewhat engaging, if not financially rewarding. She soon became the institute’s administrator. It helped her to cope with loneliness as well, since friends and socializing were still largely absent from our lives.

In hindsight, those years were a crucial stepping stone for us. By dabbling in these initiatives, we were building a community of like-minded professionals along the way. We were also getting a pulse of the place and the people, which came in handy later on. 

Startup 3.0  – Development Logics

Having tasted success with Srijan, I was eager to channelize myself in more avenues by joining hands with local organizations and initiatives. Somehow I was not able to find that space in Srijan. After several conversations with the firm’s leadership, I decided to step back from the engagement in mid of 2014. This time, Shilpa and I decided to come together as co-founders instead.

Earlier, Shilpa and I had not considered becoming partners in any professional initiative. This was largely because we didn’t want to bring work to our home. But here in Dharamshala, senior workforce with leadership qualities are hard to come by. Bridging this capability gap required us to join hands.

Our first business opportunity came when Vishal Sood, a close friend of mine, offered us business to setup a chat support team. Slowly over the years, we have built expertise in field of web development and digital marketing. We now offer product development and staffing services in IT.

Currently, we are offering IT services to clients in the U.S., Ireland, Australia, and India. In 2018, we setup a firm in the US to offer IT services. The firm was started with a Scott Allen, an American friend who lives in Dharamshala. The US firm started acquiring customers in early 2018. We have been successful in rolling out an enterprise-grade product in the VOIP domain over the last 3 years.  Couple of months back we started a dealership with a large US telecom company, which took almost a year and half to formalise.

The second business we took forward was Vayudoot, an internet service. With this our vision was to bring high-speed, low-cost, and uninterrupted Internet connectivity to remote areas. In Dec 2015 we got a license to run Internet Services from Department of Telecom. Initially, we procured Internet bandwidth from upstream telecom operators and distributed it to the last mile network. In 2019, we partnered with BSNL, a government run utility to provide high speed internet over fiber.

Today, from powering schools and financial institutions in remote areas to facilitating e-governance in villages, Vayudoot has grown steadily despite the challenges in the Telecom industry. Our fiber network is spread over a radius of 40 KM. My furthest customer is a bank branch which has no other ways of communication. An hydel power project depends on our network to send real time data about power generation to its HQ.

In these Covid times, while employees of many businesses are working remotely, the Internet services team has always been on the ground. Many colleagues contracted COVID, yet nobody left the post. Everybody realises that the Internet is an essential service today – especially so when we are extending coverage to hospitals and vaccination centres. Supporting people working from home or students taking classes.

The pandemic turned out to be a major stumbling block for the surge in growth that we were aiming at. Acquiring B2B clients in the tech space requires spending significant face-time. Many of the networking events that I had attended in India and abroad in the past had translated into a real business. But this option got closed after the onset of the pandemic in 2020. 

By God’s grace, the technology-services sector is not among the worst affected by COVID-19. We are immensely grateful to have retained all our clients through these tough times, along with a few new projects coming to us along the way. Some of our clients have been working with us for the past 7 years.

Beyond Work and Business – Co-developing the Community

With all the ups and downs at the work front, our hearts have always been set on being enablers and change agents for the community around us. We are fortunate to have been able to manifest this in various ways. 

Kangra Arts Promotion Society

One of the earliest community initiatives that we worked on was the Kangra Arts Promotion Society (KAPS). The society was setup by Mr B K Agarwal, a senior IAS officer and Dr Akshai Runchal.

KAPS is a not-for-profit organization that promotes the local artwork of the greater Kangra region in Himachal Pradesh. This is achieved through galleries and exhibitions as well as commissioned work. Over the last few years, we have worked with the KAPS team to improve the model by introducing high-quality training workshops for next generation of artists. 

Our focus has been to ensure that the paintings retain the unique local flavour but are also of top-notch quality that gains acceptance in domestic and export markets. We have further pushed for a change in the compensation model for artists so that along with earning a fixed income, they are able to charge a higher premium as well on their art pieces. 

Dharamshala International Film Festival

Another initiative that I have been volunteering for since long, is the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF). Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam – who are filmmakers and longtime residents of Dharamshala – had come to our office back in 2012 with the idea of giving the Himachali community a taste of alternative world cinema. Their idea instantly resonated with us and since then, there has been no looking back. 

Today, DIFF is one of India’s leading independent film festivals that draw in celebrities from the film ecosystem in India and beyond. Our association has grown from strength to strength over the years. My team and I contribute voluntarily during the festival.

Global Shapers Community

When the World Economic Forum reached out to me to help set up the Dharamshala Chapter of their Global Shapers initiative, it was like a dream come true. The Global Shapers Community is a network of young people driving dialogue, action and change. For me, this was an excellent opportunity to enable and empower the change-makers of today and tomorrow. 

I have been helping Global Shapers to identify local youth and foster leadership skills to prepare them for contributing to public good and welfare services. It has been a great experience through and through. It helped me to connect with the younger generation and form lasting friendships with like-minded people.

Catalyst – IIT Mandi Tech Incubator

As a technology business incubator started in 2016, Catalyst has emerged as one of the leading incubators in Himachal Pradesh and in the Himalayan region within merely 5 years of its existence. It is also among the more active incubators in the country. Through the visionary leadership provided by IIT Mandi, Catalyst has created a startup-friendly support system to ensure that the ideas of tomorrow don’t die. I have been associated with it as a member of the Board of Governors. Meeting budding entrepreneurs and listening to their stories, helps me to remain motivated and to keep moving on this journey. 

NIFT – Kangra

Sometime in 2018, I got a call from NIFT Kangra to take up a course in Personality Development. Someone close had recommended my name. Initially, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take up a teaching position. However, I was keen on getting this experience as well. Somehow I felt this was an opportunity to not just teach but to learn. 

Overcoming Challenges: The Best View Comes After the Hardest Climb

All of this is not to say that life here has been a bed of roses. If anything, it has been the opposite. 

At a time when people were flocking to the cities where opportunities, technology, and networking thrive, we had decided to go backwards. A missing entrepreneurial ecosystem, a sub-par workforce, and the sheer lack of opportunities in Dharamshala made our journey particularly difficult. We had to pave the way for things to happen and take shape – often one brick at a time. 

In the early years, for example, we invested significantly in training the local youth only to be disappointed time and again. Dharamshala is not perceived to be an IT hub, and fades in comparison to Bangalore or New Delhi. We had to compensate for it by doubling down on our marketing efforts and keeping our operations lean. We consciously avoided taking the typical startup route of securing funding. Instead, we bootstrapped our way through the journey. This slowed our growth to some extent. But then again, not having investors breathing down on our neck has been a blessing during the pandemic year. In addition, we don’t have any business debt so that’s an added bonus as well. 

Our biggest challenge continues to be sales. The second biggest challenge is finding the right people. While we are able to hire people at junior levels. We haven’t been able to find senior talent, especially for the consulting business. If you or someone in your network is looking for IT services, please do connect with me.

The ISP business has seen huge changes. The big telecom companies are fighting a price war, therefore the margins have squeezed a lot. 

Despite this, what makes me proud still is that we have managed to create employment in this area and beyond in the tech domain. We have survived this journey with support from our friends and well-wishers. The road ahead is not easy. However, we will continue to move forward. After all, the best view comes after the hardest climb, and we have miles to go before we sleep.