Ideas unlimited

Lavish funding and astronomical valuations might no longer be there, but the power of idea is taking centre stage in India’s booming startup ecosystem

- K. SUNIL THOMAS

I am going to build the McDonald’s of India!”

The business bug bit Eshwar K. Vikas fresh out of college. He started Mukunda, a restaurant serving idli and dosa at a mall in Chennai, borrowing from his parents and friends to rent the space and set up a self-service model with large screens and LED lighting. He bought the batter from someone else and set about with his ‘McDosa’ dreams.

“Business was good from day one,” Eshwar recalled. So much so that he committed the blunder of his career—a second outlet on a franchisee model through a friend. “That was when I realised we were not able to maintain the consistency of the batter,” he said. To add to his woes, the ‘dosa master’, the guy in the kitchen, left. Customers stopped coming back, complaining that the quality had gone down.

An engineer, Eshwar wanted to solve the issue by getting a machine that can make dosas uniformly. The problem? There wasn’t one.

He did not give up. He refashioned an Archimedes screw, used to pump concrete mix in construction, into a pump for dosa batter. A person was assigned to design and make a tawa (wok) for the machine. And presto, Eshwar had pivoted from running a ‘manual’ restaurant into an automated kitchen.