Neither Villains Nor Stewards: The Everyday Ecologies of Mahua and the Possibility of BoP Entrepreneurship
- Arpita Ghatak
- Jul 9
- 6 min read
Updated: Aug 10
"Arpita, you can't be a social activist, a teacher, and a researcher at the same time. Not at this age.”
That was the advice I received after being rejected from a job interview for lecturer position at a London business school in 2022. The professor offered his time generously, and I appreciated his candour: "not at this age.” That “at this age” part, oddly enough, felt reassuring. But the rest? Not quite. But the line stuck with me, not because I agreed, but because I knew how far it missed the reality of the work I do.
When you research Base of the Pyramid (BoP) entrepreneurship in rural India, you are not just sitting in front of spreadsheets. You are sharing meals with women who don’t call themselves entrepreneurs, though they clearly are. You are walking through forests where economic survival, ecological wisdom, and social constraints are tightly intertwined. And you are listening to stories; sometimes joyful, sometimes heartbreaking that don’t fit neatly into theories or policy documents.
BoP refers to the world’s largest but poorest socio-economic group. In India, it includes millions of women whose labour remain informal, unpaid, and unrecognised sustains entire families and local economies. Their ventures are often rooted in tradition, constrained by social norms, and shaped by survival. And yet, they represent powerful forms of entrepreneurship.
You are working in places where even the idea of change feels distant. Where beating a woman after getting drunk isn’t considered a crime. Where even the wife sees it as routine, something as normal as making the evening tea. No complaint. No outrage. Just daily life lived quietly and with remarkable resilience.
The Everyday Challenges Go Unnoticed
These women face a unique set of challenges:
Their businesses are deeply informal and family-embedded, making access to loans, legal support, or markets difficult.
Gendered norms mean their work is seen as an extension of household duty, not economic contribution.
They are often excluded from policy visibility and even when policies exist, awareness is limited, and the distance between policy and practice remains stark.
BoP entrepreneurship is not about scale or speed. It’s about resilience. It’s about women drying mahua flowers on rooftops, hiding them from excise officers. It’s about making choices in contexts where choices are few.
Through my research, I explore what it means to study entrepreneurship in such settings; not through a lens of intervention, but through presence, humility, and conversation.
What can we learn when we resist neat categories like “villains” and “stewards”? When we listen before we act? And when we take seriously the everyday ecologies that sustain both people and the planet?
BoP Entrepreneurship: More Than a Business Model
BoP entrepreneurship is often framed in economic terms as a way to bring the “unbanked” into the market, or to “unlock potential” in untapped regions. But on the ground, it’s far messier. It is not just about startups or micro-enterprises. It’s about complex negotiations with identity, survival, and sometimes even silence.
Take mahua, a tree at once sacred and stigmatised. It offers food, medicine, oil, liquor, shade, and livelihoods. In tribal belts, right from western to eastern India through the central highlands, the mahua tree is part of daily life. But it also carries colonial and contemporary baggage. Mahua liquor was criminalised under British rule and continues to be marginalised by state policy. As a result, the women who harvest and process mahua flowers, often with incredible care and skill remain stuck in a grey zone of legality and legitimacy. Their work is neither fully protected nor recognised.
In BoP entrepreneurship, one thing I have learnt is that sometimes policies exist, but few know how to access them. And even fewer have the means to navigate the bureaucratic layers between eligibility and outcome. The distance between the text of policy and the lives it hopes to touch is vast; especially when those lives are shaped by multiple exclusions: gender, caste, geography, and language.
Living Research, Not Just Writing It
In our K2A (Knowledge to Action) project, we didn’t arrive with survey tools or ready-made frameworks. We arrived with questions. Then we put those questions aside, and simply listened.
We spent weeks in the village. We walked with women collecting mahua at dawn. We sat with them during the long hours of flower drying. We joined community meetings where words were few, but silences told us many things. We learned that data here is not binary or categorical. It’s layered, emotional, and shaped by trust.
A woman might harvest less this week; not because of low yields, but because her child is ill. She might cut branches; not out of carelessness, but because she needs firewood and has no other option. These are not decisions made from ignorance. They are acts of resilience, of balancing immediate needs with long-term hope.
Neither Villains, Nor Stewards
Mainstream narratives often paint rural communities in binaries: either as noble custodians of nature or reckless destroyers of it. But reality is more nuanced.
The women we worked with are not romanticised stewards of the forest, nor are they thoughtless exploiters. They make choices in deeply constrained environments. Some decisions are ecological; others are emotional or circumstantial. They live in contingency, adapting to shifting conditions with grace and grit.
And that’s why BoP entrepreneurship cannot be separated from ecology. It emerges from a context where people and planet are entangled; not as slogans, but as lived experience. Mahua is not just a resource. It’s a relationship.
What Counts as Innovation
If you walked past a woman drying mahua flowers on a school rooftop, you might miss the innovation entirely. But it’s there; in the timing, the storage decision, the evasion of excise surveillance, and the subtle coordination between neighbours.
Innovation at the BoP is mostly not typically technological. It’s often social, informal, and hidden in plain sight. It’s the quiet brilliance of doing more with less or doing something different when nothing else works.
Yet, these innovations are often overlooked by formal incubators or funding schemes. Why? Because they don’t fit the language of entrepreneurship as it’s commonly understood. They don’t come with pitch decks or financial projections. They come with dried flowers in a sack, a deep knowledge of weather patterns and a mental map of informal markets.
Rethinking Impact
In academia, we are often asked: “What’s the impact of your work?” The answer, in this case, is not always a policy brief. It’s a moment. Like when a woman says, “No one ever asked me to speak in a panchayat meeting before.” Or when a girl, watching me scribble in my notebook, quietly asks, “How can I work like you?”
These are not mere outputs. They are shifts. They don’t fit easily in evaluation frameworks. But they matter. Impact is not always a directly connected with changing policy brief or a TED Talk. Sometimes, it is showing up. Sometimes, it is writing with care. Sometimes, it is walking alongside someone until they can walk without you.
Listening First, Sharing Next
If there is one thing I have learnt or could offer to a fellow researcher just starting their journey- it’s this: don’t begin with questions. Begin with presence. Let people speak, when and how they wish to. The story is not always where you expect it to be. It is not just in what is said, but also in what is avoided, deferred, or left unsaid.
Only after you have truly listened, you can start to share your questions; your experience and the tools you believe are useful. Let go of the idea that you are working for them. You are working with them. This isn’t charity. It’s mutual learning. And for that, we need more space for slow conversations; not just rapid assessments.
BoP as a Way of Seeing
To me, BoP entrepreneurship, is a way of seeing - the world, and our place in it. It is a reminder that dignity doesn’t always wear formal clothes, and that possibility often grows in the margins. If we truly care about inclusion, we must first question who gets counted, whose stories are told, and what we call success. Because change does not always announce itself. Sometimes it just arrives quietly, with a basket of flowers, and a story waiting to be heard
Arpita, is a Lecturer in Innovation & Entrepreneurship (Assistant Professor), with 7+ years of industry experience and over 6 years of researching alongside communities at the Base of the Pyramid. A lifelong student of people, places, and everyday stories, where entrepreneurship and social inclusion intersect.