Indians have to understand importance of inclusive business: Neelam Chhiber

Pune: It was a student project at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad in the eighties that set Industree founder Neelam Chhiber on track to working with artisans to drive social inclusion and change in some of the most backward communities in the country.

Since then, Chhiber, the maiden winner of the Economic Times Evoke Award for Social Entrepreneurship, has created a model of entrepreneurship that has taken work to women in these communities, which became even more important in the past year as global supply chains came to a standstill due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“It’s important to look into the future and at how global consumption is changing. Covid-19 has been a great call to action because we’ve discovered how it can cause such a catastrophe in the supply chain…,” Chhiber, founder-director of Industree Crafts, said.


Looking back at her early days, Chhiber said the biggest learning was that while there was phenomenal skill and talent, there was very little ability to integrate this with global supply chains.

Industree builds collectives of women, deeply inspired by the Amul model. “Why are we not able to build more of these in the creative manufacturing space and ensure that maximum incomes go down to the producers? We build producer companies under Indian corporate law and they supply to global supply chains like Ikea and the Future Group,” Chhiber pointed out.

Referring to what artisans do as ‘creative manufacturing’, Chhiber said she wants to drive the handicrafts space towards a more modernised and sustainable production system.

The foundation, along with the Mother Earth brand, focuses on food, fashion and home and have been built in line with the United Nations Development Programme’s sustainable development goals.

Chhiber said that the work the foundation does touches 11 of these goals and aims to impact three million artisans and farmers through its backward integration programmes.

In the long term, Chhiber is looking at how the three core sectors – civil society, governments and markets and market-based businesses work together to achieve a common goal, as it cannot be done by any one of them single-handedly.

Industree today supplies to brands like Ikea, Fabindia and the Future Group and has opted for blended finance models, including private investments, government aid and philanthropic capital as they are all important to achieve different aspects of what they do.

The biggest challenge, she said, remains in transitioning from running things on her own to a larger team.

“This is another big anomaly in the world of development that social enterprises will just magically scale and employ professionals,” said Chhiber.

Social sector ventures cannot scale in the same way as private enterprises and some of the funding will have to go towards paying people professional salaries in order to get the right people.

Chhiber, who has won notable global awards including from the Schwab Foundation for Social Enterprise, a sister organisation of the World Economic Forum, for her work in the past, said that none of them has evoked the same kind of response in India as this award.