B2R 10th Anniversary Celebration

Dear Friend of B2R, 

                                                                                                  

We started B2R operations ten years ago, to the day. Ten years on, as we celebrate our tenth corporate anniversary, I’d like to share a few personal reflections.

On my walk today morning, as I looked up to a beautifully overcast cloudy sky with Mukteshwar mountain in the backdrop, I thought to myself "7^th September each year has usually been like the Janamashtmi festival, usually will have some rainfall on that day!' As I walked back, I recalled this day ten years ago in 2009 when we had loads of furniture lying outside the facility, paint yet to dry, praying it doesn’t rain! It had rained heavily the previous evening and overnight, but despite an overcast sky, after a brief morning spell, it didn’t rain till much later in the day. Sitting on the center rooftop, we started the training session with the first batch of new hires that morning with the “organizational & personal values” session, the first induction step to be part of B2R.

Of course, it started long before September 7, 2009. It started with many journeys to the hills over twenty five years, and in many interactions with youngsters expressing their frustration over the futility of  going to school to study, due to lack of credible livelihood options for them near home. On one such weekend trip while walking in the hills, I had a serendipitous meeting with Kalyan Paul (running a non-profit Grassroots and Umang near Majkhali, where I had started building a house). I didn’t have a clear answer to the question he posed, as to what I was doing there or what I wished to do. On being asked what I currently did, I replied “BPO”, and the prompt reply was “so why don’t you do that here?” That rhetorically posed question set me thinking, and my next call was to Venki, asking him how crazy an idea was trying to do BPO in the hills. In an encouraging response, he asked me to come back and meet him to discuss seriously about it. And the rest as they say is history!

As I look back on the ten years since then, there has been so much learning, so much joy and pain, on this roller coaster journey of building B2R as an organization. From learning how to dig electrical earth-grounding pits correctly in the hills (we burnt out two UPS cards before we learnt that!), to learning how to deliver financial print to tight service levels for a Global Fortune 500 customer, the journey has been powerful and purposeful. We were clear that we had an advantage over the city -  youngsters in a village with  “hunger to change their lives” was the cornerstone to replicate what India did in cities like Delhi, Mumbai & Bangalore to become the back-office to the western world twenty five years back. And we have worked to create the same professional capacity in a terrain which has 70% forest cover and some of the most scenic views of the Himalayas. We managed to do so, confidently armed with domain, functional and process knowledge. Our team delivered to diverse requirements of global customers, whether in Accounting & Financial Services, Content transformation, Publishing & Image processing, Legal, Research and Data management, or  running an inbound Reproductive Health call center or Citizen support Helpline.

In our early experiences in interacting with the local community, we found them curious yet hesitant, as always, of something new, that rural BPO represented to a village. The consistent support of CHIRAG (local non-profit partner), helped us navigate initial hiccups with their deep local expertise and relationships with community built over decades. The endless cups of tea with Madhavan (then Executive Director, CHIRAG) bundled with suggestions and advice helped brainstorm how to approach a difficult issue. We learnt quickly with the help of CHIRAG, and made working with a community partner an intrinsic part of our model, later applying the same principle to work in a new district with Lakshmi Ashram, a non-profit built on Gandhian principles based in Kausani. The emphasis to encourage more young women to apply was a response to the traditional gender bias, and engineering our hiring process without reservations or quotas was our way to strengthen gender equity and create equal opportunity in a relevant manner. I am happy to report that over ten years we have always had more than 50% young women in our teams (currently 53%). Behind the numbers we saw the change in many confident young women as they created new social equations in their homes and the community. Over ten years, B2R has trained and employed over 700 rural youth in Uttarakhand, (~50% women), generating ~620,000 person-days of direct employment, distributing direct wages of ~US$1.8 million to low income rural youth. Its presence in the region has created entrepreneurs and indirect services to the tune of ~US$650,000 were procured from local vendors. The positive impact of B2R is not limited to local economy. It is visible in skills development and economic self-sufficiency of rural youth, upward shift in women’s marriageable ages. This was also reinforced by a recent chat with a B2R “parent”, who expressed gratefully how daughters have saved up and contributed to home expenses and their own & siblings’ education and marriage expenses.

As with other life-changing learning experiences, I will never forget our ‘near death’ situation in 2013-2014 due to funding and financial crunch. The patience, confidence and support reposed by our customers, partners, employees, angel investors, and our own families helped us to survive and turn around the situation to come this far. We set our delivery footprint in international waters in 2015 by delivering to a Mexican customer, from Mexico with a local team. The team which flew from Uttarakhand to train & set up and deliver from Mexico proved that we could challenge ourselves time and again, each time to achieve new heights. Our representation on the Steering Committee of the Global Impact Sourcing Coalition reflects a stronger, more confident, self-reliant organization, charting our global growth path on a self-sustainable foundation. I remember and thank with sincere gratitude, the contribution of each person who has worked in our team, for being a pillar of support and strength in helping us reach where we are today…to become a cockroach as we like to refer to ourselves, which can survive even a nuclear holocaust…a cockroach who wishes to, and has learnt to fly (an inspiration from the flying cockroach found in the hills!)

Over the next few editions, through our newsletter we shall share more aspects of this story, a story of change, of hope, patience, tumultuous times and persistence. Please join us as our teams celebrate a decade of creating…a quiet revolution in the hills. Or rather (as pertinently pointed out today morning by a customer & friend)…it’s only fair to say after ten years that the quiet revolution in the hills is now a mainstream movement.  I look forward to continued partnership to take this mission to the next level. Thank you.

- Dhiraj Dolwani