500 Mumbai entrepreneurs coming back to Bihar : can this become a trend?

500 Mumbai entrepreneurs coming back to Bihar : can this become a trend?

Mumbai: meet Saeed Khan, a Dharavi-based micro-entrepreneur, a school dropout from Aurangabad district in Bihar who has made it in life. Way back in 1979 Khan arrived in Mumbai and found work as a salesman at a shoe shop for some months. Soon, after apprenticing with a metal melting unit in Dharavi, he rented his own room and started manufacturing metal buckles for belts.
Khan has come a long way since and has grown into one of India’s leading high-end buckle manufacturers. His products can be found on display in showrooms from Dubai to Paris and he also owns a spacious apartment and fleet of luxury cars. Is that the end of the story and ‘happily ever after’? Not really! As part of an initiative of the Association of Progressive And Resurgent National Awam (APARNA), an NGO, he plans to make a come back to Bihar. He has bought a three-acre piece of land at Fatuha from the Bihar government at a concessional rate and is building an industrial hub for 500 Bihari entrepreneurs in Mumbai who will employ around 15,000 skilled and semi-skilled workers, also from Mumbai. The members of the above NGO are all Mumbai-based entrepreneurs from Bihar.

The plan for reverse migration is backed by sound economics and not simply dewy teary sentiments. Most of the Bihari entrepreneurs are into leather goods and embroidery, and the raw materials are sourced from Kolkata and Bhagalpur. ‘Labour will also be cheaper,” explains Mohammed Hassan who owns an air-conditioner repairing unit in Dharavi. “A worker who gets Rs 10,000 a month in Mumbai will accept Rs 2,000 less in Bihar since the cost of living is less there. And then there’s the added bonus of being closer to his family.’

The first phase of The Fatuha industrial hub, meant exclusively for Bihari entrepreneurs and workers in Mumbai, has been designed by the well-known architect Hafeez Contractor. It will have 250 shops, a restaurant and a bank. Developer Tabrez Rubberwalla has offered to build the complex on a non-profit basis. “It will be part of my payback to my janambhoomi,” he says.

Ravishankar Srivastav, Mumbai chairman of the Bihar Foundation, a Bihar government initiative to bring non-resident Biharis back to the state, is excited about the project. The Foundation is playing the role of guide to APARNA, and Srivastav says the Fatuha project is the ‘the first planned initiative for a reverse migration of Biharis’. C K Mishra, principal secretary, Bihar industry department says ‘They have the option of expanding vertically, and we are also trying to help get them private land from those who are willing to sell or lease. This could be a wonderful opportunity for Biharis living outside the state who are willing to return and settle down here.’ Another reason why the Biharis would want to move away from Mumbai – the anti-North Indian, anti-Bihari campaigns of the Shiv Sena and Maharashtra Navnirman Sena. ‘Every attack on Biharis by the Sena-MNS was like a spear going through my heart,’ says Umar Faruque, a bag manufacturer who owns a showroom near Crawford Market.

What about the migrant workers? Umar Akhtar, who is among the 35 Biharis working for bag manufacturer Anwar Kamal says ‘Nothing will make me happier than working at a place from where I can go home regularly and meet my wife’. Kamal, the owner joins the worker in this sentiment and says once he shifts to Fatuha, he could arrange for a bus that would take the workers from the industrial hub to their villages for two-day trips once a month.

Could this be an indication of days to come and a new beginning for Mumbai’s 1.5 million Biharis who want to return will finally get the opportunity?

[courtesy: The Times of India]