Almora, January 29, 2020: Braving biting cold and snowfall, entrepreneurs from Almora, Nainital and Bageshwar districts of Uttarakhand attended the day-long induction workshops for the third cohort on entrepreneurship, which consists of 77 entrepreneurs. This is Udhyam’s largest cohort so far.
The day started with Pankaj Wadhwa, founder, and Anjali Nabiyal, Head of Udhyam, welcoming the entrepreneurs and introducing them to the program and informing them about the selection process. “This year Udhyam received over 1200 registrations for the cohort, and out of them, 77 were finally selected,” Nabiyal informed the audience.
A role-play was used to illustrate the selection process and answer various frequently asked questions on EMIs, processing insurance charges etc. The session also included answering questions from the entrepreneurs.
Cohort Three Business Idea Type
The second session on identifying Unique Selling Proposition (USP) was conducted by Kalyani Mirajkar, co-founder of the Birdsong
Cafe, Bhimtal. She began by sharing her story about relocating to Bhimtal from Delhi to start her cafe, which offers excellent food and outdoor eating space. She divided the participants into teams and encouraged participants to identify their USP, which could be related to credit, cleanliness, location of the shop, unique material etc.
This exercise was followed by a presentation of the teams and interactions to help them in getting clarity.
Just before lunch, Preeti Bhandari, an entrepreneur from the second cohort, briefly spoke about her entrepreneurial journey and the role played by Udhyam in it. She ended her talk by saying, “Whatever I am today, it is because of Udhyam’s support.”
After lunch, Anupama Pain, a co-founder of India Fellow, conducted a financial literacy workshop, in which she explained the importance of daily bookkeeping with examples and case studies to make them understand the best practices of bookkeeping.
The last session of the day, on maintaining high CIBIL score and the importance of not defaulting on the payment of EMIs was conducted by Wadhwa.