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Some of the most successful enterprises in the world have come out of a need for something that was not available. Back in 2007, Aruna Kappagantula of Hyderabad was also looking for something that wasn’t available: a particular kind of table.

“I was doing up my house and needed a specific table for it,” she says. “When I couldn’t find it in the city, I went on the Internet where I chanced upon bamboo furniture. Till then, I had never seen or heard of bamboo.” That search led her and her husband Prashant Lingam to set up Bamboo House India. The company is a social enterprise that promotes the use of bamboo as an eco-friendly substitute to wood, steel, iron and plastic and also generates livelihood for artisans in the bamboo sector.

“The search for that table let us understand this plant and also the skills of people in the tribal areas who work with bamboo,” Lingam says. “Till then, we thought bamboo was only good for scaffolding.”

This search and eventual fascination came for Kappagantula at a time when she had just got married and was looking for a new career. It was her husband who pushed her to start exploring the world of bamboo furniture and whether there was a business model there. The two scoured the Internet for more information on bamboo cultivation and furniture and were eventually led to Professor M.P. Ranjan, Head of the Centre of Bamboo Initiatives at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

“It was Professor Ranjan who introduced us to the amazing world of bamboo furniture and a community in the village of Katlamara, Tripura, on the India-Bangladesh border that made amazing bamboo furniture, but was languishing in neglect,” Lingam adds.

Kappagantula decided that she would take up the community and work with them to manufacture bamboo furniture. She initially thought she could establish a link up with them and then the process of ordering and manufacturing could be set up. However that turned out to be more than just a long shot.

“There were many barriers,” she recalls. “The villagers spoke only in their native dialect. There were no phones, mobiles or the Internet. No courier went to these village and even postal services were rudimentary. The roads to the villages went through insurgent territory.”

But Katlamara was important to the duo’s business plans. The village is home to perhaps the best bamboo species in the world—Thrystostachys Oleverii. It offers the best range, height, growth and flexibility to make everything from handicrafts to bamboo housing. Government apathy, however, had left the artisan community and trees in a state of rot.

“The neglect actually opened up doors for another party—us—to come in and give these artisans a second shot at livelihood,” Lingam says. “It took us four months, a couple of trips, and countless meetings with the community elders, but we finally caught a break there. My wife’s mastery of Bangla helped.”

The duo managed to get seven main artisans back to their trade by offering a compensation of around Rs.30,000 for six months with no delivery commitments, and further agreed to buy whatever they produced—at their prices. The channel was now open. The couple would call once every week at the sole telephone 80 kilometers from the village to relay orders and for the artisans to communicate any of their issues.

“The groundwork was also put up by Aruna in training the artisans,” Lingam says. “She taught them how to use a laptop, e-mail and the Internet. Also, the artisans were making very rural focused products like baskets. Aruna exposed them to more urban designs that would sell well to the city clientele.”

However, even though the couple had got the supply side fixed, they were really not sure what kind of bamboo furniture would be accepted as it was still a nascent concept. Lingam says that they conscientiously decided to spare some time first and research the market. They went across India, talked to furniture showrooms, attended exhibitions and even set up a website to provide information on bamboo and why it makes for good, reliable furniture.

All of that culminated in the opening of their first showroom, Bamboo House, at their home in January 2008. A second showroom has also been opened recently in the more upmarket area of Banjara Hills in Hyderabad. The response to the showrooms has been great—enough for the couple to consider ramping up their production from 400 pieces a month to over a 1,000 a month. “The response has been great and, in fact, we have had 90 franchise enquiries and more from overseas,” he adds. “But we want to take it slow as we realize that we still have several constraints that need to be opened up.”

Funding is one of them, according to him. Till date, he has invested over Rs.10 lakh of his own. Lingam has also approached many organizations that are sitting on funds meant for the promotion of bamboo, and lobbied hard with them for grants that would help market these artisans’ products.

Even as Bamboo House is working on setting up exclusive bamboo showrooms, it is also working on commercializing IIT-Delhi’s bamboo bowbeam technology for rural housing. Also on the cards is a manufacturing facility for bamboo pole-based housing structures, a bamboo pole-based furniture manufacturing unit in Andhra Pradesh, and a bamboo mat training and production unit in the duo’s city. However, these plans may take a while, as they are dependent on certain government grants. “Our business is scalable, but not rapidly scalable,” Lingam adds. “Even with our relatively high margins, break even is not close.”

Bamboo House’s biggest roadblock:
The Indian Forest Act of 1927, which classifies bamboo as a tree, not grass. That ruling means that it cannot be harvested and then transported elsewhere. In addition, the Act rules that the bamboo belongs to the tribals of the area. This means that only they can harvest it. This further means that Lingam and Kappagantula’s expansion plans will always be choked by a much-throttled supply.

©Entrepreneur May 2010

Tags:
artisan, Aruna Kappagantula, bamboo, Bamboo House, furniture, Prashant Lingam, Tripura