Changemakers: Gaurav Mehta

In just 10 years, Gaurav Mehta MBA2010 has built a group of 15,000 entrepreneurs who are earning a livelihood and making their communities better at the same time. “It’s scary sometimes,” he says as he reflects on the expansion of Dharma Life, the Delhi-based social enterprise he founded in 2009 while doing his MBA at London Business School. “We’ve been growing it fast, but it’s taking its own course now.”

The company was born out of the realisation that there weren’t enough jobs for India’s 900 million people living in rural areas. Mehta’s idea was to create entrepreneurs selling socially impactful goods – from solar lights to sewing machines – to help improve village life and provide livelihoods for the entrepreneurs. Recruits had to be trained in the benefits of the products, such as switching from firewood to a clean-cooking device, so they could drive behaviour change.

The 15,000 Dharma Life Entrepreneurs (DLEs) work in more than 40,000 villages in 13 states across India to address various sustainable development goals. To date they have reached more than 10 million beneficiaries, including training more than five million women to use a smartphone, selling more than 156,000 solar lighting solutions, 134,000 mobile phones, 33,000 clean-cooking devices and 2.7 million sachets of fortified health drinks, among many other items. The entrepreneurs earn a regular monthly income that can rise depending on sales and marketing programmes.

The company’s growth has accelerated in the past few years as the model has been honed, training programmes have been certified and technology has taken off. More than three-quarters of the entrepreneurs operate online via smartphones, boosted by increasing 3G coverage and cheaper devices. They use them to order products, show villagers information and collect consumer and research data through purpose-built apps.

As the organisation approaches, its 10th anniversary it’s a satisfying state of affairs for 39-year-old, German- born Mehta. His grandparents moved from India to Frankfurt in the 1950s and he grew up in Düsseldorf. His only encounters with India were in the winter holidays, when he would travel to visit relatives there.

He remembers being struck by the poverty he saw and he went on to fundraise for Pratham, a non-profit organisation providing education to underprivileged children in India, which he first encountered as an undergraduate in London.

He took jobs in investment banking, then private equity until a serious illness forced him to take six months off, prompting a re-evaluation of his goals: “I just thought that if I do survive this health incident, I want to make it count. I realised I needed to change the balance, so I quit my job and decided to spend my time on making an impact.”

He decided to do an MBA to work out the best way he could make a contribution. At LBS he came up with the idea for his entrepreneurial venture and set up ‘Project Dharma’ with co-founders mostly from his MBA class. They ran a pilot in India with a batch of villagers provided by Pratham’s network of contacts, then launched the first programme.

“We trained 100 people and started to hire people to manage it,” Mehta recalls. “Then, over the final year of the MBA, a couple of us continued to oversee it via Skype and kept flying back to India every two weeks. We grew it to 450 people over the year and, after graduation, I moved to India to run it.”