Labour Of Love

By enabling seven lakh livelihoods in the informal sector, Gayathri Vasudevan is aiming to build a profitable, 1,000-crore innovative learning company in four years

- Sayan ChakraBorty

It was an offer that Gayathri Vasudevan couldn’t refuse. Not because it was the most compelling of them all. But because it was the only one she had.

“That was the slimiest experience of my life.”

In the one year that she spent crisscrossing the volatile terrains of Bihar, Vasudevan had let nothing, not even patriarchy and inter-caste strife, thwart an extensive research she was leading on behalf of the Institute for Human Development, a Delhi-based research non-profit, on the state of affairs in 30 villages. She had always managed to chart her way into the hinterlands to study development, often coaxing fractious politicians and their affiliates to let her enter their fiercely-guarded territories.

But, that overcast morning in 1999, when she set out for a marooned village in Nalanda district, Vasudevan was up against nature. The Ganga was overflowing and no boatman was willing to brave the turbulent river.

“I was arrogant enough to say that I will have to go now. They said, there is a buffalo, sit on it. There were a couple of foreign interns with me and I was supposed to lead the research delegation. And I did not know how to swim. I was trying hard not to look terrorised,” says Vasudevan, grinning.

A while later, after some hemming and hawing, she was on the muck-covered buffalo.

It was a big leap of faith for the city-bred Vasudevan, daughter of an Indian Administrative Service officer. Growing up in Bengaluru and Delhi, she had almost everything at her beck and call. Poverty, unemployment, health care, or the lack of it, were largely living-room ruminations. For her, a management degree from a reputable institute was meant to be a stepping stone to a a plum job.