For these women, hurdles are only a myth

Ajay Joshi

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, April 17

“Equality of work opportunities and family support are the two key pillars for women to excel in world of innovators, startups and business”. This is what the young and experienced leading women entrepreneurs concluded while interacting with The Tribune regarding the challenges faced by women start-ups.

The LPU and Startup Metamorphosis hosted the North-India’s biggest Women Entrepreneurship event “The Enterprising SHE”, where 15+ top entrepreneurs motivated thousands of students to think big and adopt entrepreneurial career. The Tribune also spoke to a few of the women entrepreneurs from different parts of the country about their ideas, opinions and suggestions to the upcoming brigade of entrepreneurs.

Divya Ahuja Mahajan (29) is a city-based business woman who is one of the managing directors at the Kosmos Hundai Dealership and as a managing member of the family run business she has been catering with team building. It’s been six years that Divya has been working as the leading decision maker in her firm and she notably believes in promoting more and more women workforce in private sector enterprise. She had reserved 30-40 percent seats in her office for women and currently 70 woman employees are working in her Jalandhar, Phagwara, Nawanshahr Hyundai showrooms. She is also motivating girls from rural areas of the Doaba region to initiate industry-related work.

Aavni Parekh director of Empathy (SHEROS) guided students to keep on learning as much they can and never leave any stone unturned to carve out a niche for themselves. She is running an online platform sheroes.com where woman from every corners of the globe share their views and opinions. SHEROS a safe a and trusted space with a logo “Aspire, Achieve and Celebrate” has around three million women as community members that talk about Health, Relationship, career and many more issues.

She urged students to be a key contributor towards the wholesome development of the society. Explaining her meaning for an ‘Entrepreneur’ she said, “An entrepreneur is not the one who focuses on his growth but the one who believes in the collective efforts for everybody’s growth.”

Nidhisha Varsney one of the co founder of fitmein.com guiding the students said, “Experiential learning is the best to grow, once should always have a positive and a fight back attitude.” Before starting Fitme.in, which is one of India’s largest technology driven fitness company, Varsney said, she used to work in a private company and there were challenges and doubts to come up with a project where you try to create a network of 25,000 fitness studios. But all such obstacles last for a shorter while and also it’s not about a woman or a man, everyone is equal, what matters is that there should be a zeal for working hard and achieving targets.

Kashmira S Jadhao, director Jadhao Group Companies and an expert in production engineering while gracing the event said, family support is what a women entrepreneur seek, if you have a correct guiding mentor at your home then nothing comes your way. She also encouraged all female students to do things which they want to and always consider parents the guiding factor of one’s life.

After finishing her masters from Netherlands, she decided to bring in more innovation to her motherland hence joined her family business. She says for creating more job opportunities for woman, our culture needs to be more open. Currently working on her own pet project for solar panels cleaning she said, “In India women are mostly restricted to human resource or hotel management widely therefore, equality in subject choices should be there in our institutions. Lastly, advising the upcoming start-ups she told them to be, “Proactive, embrace multitasking (adopt new initiatives everytime ) and bring innovation to to the world.