HT Salutes: When business turned into charity

For 29-year-old entrepreneurs Sukriti Sharma and Nitin Gaur, the penny dropped when they saw an old woman sitting by the roadside in the last week of March – shortly after the lockdown was announced — while driving up to their milk processing plant located at Nakraunda in this Uttarakhand town.

“We stepped out from our car and asked her why she was outside during the lockdown and all she said was that she had not eaten for five days. She must have been working as a house maid and that incident really moved us,” Sharma recalled.

Gaur and Sharma own Moo Day, a milk production plant that processes and sells full cream, toned milk and cow milk. Started last April with an initial investment of Rs 45 lakh, their turnover was around Rs 6 lakh a month. They hadn’t quite broken even, but they were close. Then the lockdown began, and they lost the bulk of their clients – hotels and restaurants.

Their turnover dipped to Rs 4.5 lakh a month, Sharma said. Though the bulk of the milk that they process comes from her family’s cattle farm situated on the outskirts of Dehradun, with almost 250 Holstein Friesian cows, they also sourced milk from local farmers. This stopped too.

By all measures, things were bad and about to get worse.

“The initial days of lockdown due to Covid-19 had been really tragic for the entire world,” Sharma said.

Meeting the old woman, however, made the two of them think about how their processing plant could be put to better use, albeit without any monetary benefit.

Gaur reached out to his friends who worked as social activists in the city, and through them, he got in touch with non-governmental organisations, and took their help to distribute Moo Day milk packets and biscuits, free of cost, to the hungry.

“Eventually through word of mouth, more people learnt about what we were doing and contacted us for help. We started distributing milk pouches daily in different areas across Dehradun,” said Gaur.

In their own plant, they said, they made arrangements for their 11 workers and employees to stay at the farm.

Those who visited the markets frequently — to take orders of day-to-day milk requirement from retail shops or departmental stores — were either asked to work provided safety kits, Sharma said.

Neha Joshi, a social activist who has been involved in helping locals and stranded migrants during the lockdown said, “We used to distribute food amongst people initially and then we got in touch with Nitin and Sukriti. With their efforts we were able to distribute more items. Small gestures like this, giving milk packets, biscuits and bread at times, helped a lot of people in ways we cannot even imagine.”

“There were different kinds of restrictions and limitations that we had during the lockdown, but we were able to work it out. Coming across that old lady on that road, we realised that it is not always about profit and that we had to help people in whatever manner we could. We are glad that we were a part of essential services through which we were able to help those in need,” Gaur said.

Since June 6, Uttarakhand has imposed lockdown in Dehradun on weekends, so Sharma and Gaur have restricted distributing the milk packets on weekdays only. Their main clients – restaurants and hotels – remain shut.

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