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Sonu Iyer: Hello and welcome to our special edition of EY India Insights podcast series to celebrate and showcase remarkable women leaders. I am Sonu Iyer, your host today. I am the Executive Sponsor for Diversity, Equity and Inclusiveness (DEI) at EY in India. In this special edition, to celebrate the International Women's Day, I am delighted to welcome Deepa Pant to our EY India Insights podcast. Deepa Pant is the founder and CEO of SVATANYA, a responsible creative craft enterprise that empowers underprivileged women by upskilling them to make beautiful, environment friendly handicraft products. Deepa, by qualification, is also a fashion graduate from National Institute of Fashion Technology (NIFT), and she has 13-plus years in corporate world, and her last two roles were as chief operating officer.

She continues to inspire many by her visionary philanthropic work. Her transformative work embodies purpose and spiritual depth. She inspires co-creation and unity. Her unwavering dedication to social impact and spiritual enlightenment continues to elevate communities and ignite positive changes worldwide.

I am super privileged to host Deepa in our podcast today. Thank you, Deepa. Welcome to EY India Insights podcast.

Deepa: Thank you so much, Sonu. I am really looking forward to this. Thank you for having me here.

Sonu:  What is the inspiration for creating SVATANYA? This whole journey that you have embarked on to empower underprivileged women, making them entrepreneurs in the craft that they are best at – tell us about the vision, the mission that guides you in driving this social enterprise. 

Deepa: I remember the first day I had just done my postgrad from NIFT and stepped into the fashion industry with stars in my eyes; a 13-year-long stint working with big names like Nike and Woolworths, launching a domestic activewear brand, taking it across India, working with six of the eight IPL teams as they are in stadium and merchandise partners, working with artisans, shilpgurus, etc. – it was a very wholesome experience. I saw the good side of the industry and the bad side. For example, every rejected shirt of a global big global brand that we manufactured for, it was actually incinerated in a factory. It was burned so that the label would not get compromised. And it made no sense to me.

I come from Delhi. Some people live on roads, even in extreme cold without proper clothing. So, aping the West blatantly or rejecting thousands of meters of raw material just because there was a little difference of color palette how we treated our workers, artisans; how we run our businesses, which were purely based about money – all these questions had started bothering me. In 2012, I was at the peak of my career, and I remember being completely disillusioned and even thinking that what was I doing there. Forget about changing lives, was I even creating a positive impact in a single person's life? 

That is when I decided to take a break, volunteered as a choreographer for an NGO for street kids, for a dance competition. We danced on ‘Jai Ho’ and we won. That is when I realized that whatever we love to do, if we do it with a bit of consciousness, it can bring so much joy to people. Also, it was serendipity because that is when I met their mothers, their aunts, and these women are in millions who have migrated from villages and are living in urban slums all around us. They are homemakers and in reality, they are actually homebound due to patriarchal norms and lack of education, skills. They have aspirations, but no opportunities. Dreams to become somebody their families or their children would look up to.

So, SVATANYA became such a platform to handhold and train such women, help them create beautiful, handcrafted conscious products like toys, accessories, décor, gifting products, using upcycled and recycled raw materials. They could do all this from the comfort of their homes. The women earned with dignity, and we market it through various B2B, B2C channels to make it a sustainable business model. As far as Svatanya is concerned, it is driven by triple bottom line principle – people, planet and profit. That is why over the years, we align beautifully with all the concepts like SDGs, circular economy, Make in India and Atmanirbharta. Incidentally, Svatanya means swatantra (independent) women. I am happy to share that over the years more than 1,000 women have been trained by us and some of them have been continuously working with us for nine years now. 

Sonu: What according to you sets SVATANYA apart?

Deepa: I would say the first aspect to it is feasibility. When we work with the community, we work with the women, we empower them to decide what is it that they want to do, when to come, how many hours to put in, how to get trained, you know, how to work in the best way possible, which suits them and their families. Interestingly, the whole model evolved around the women very beautifully. We had a work from home model much before the pandemic really hit us. 

The second aspect or the USP is our deliverability. So, the handcrafting industry has three major challenges - quality, consistency, and timelines. We have been able to crack the code on all three and actually can proudly share that in the last 11 years, not a single order has been rejected or canceled due to quality or delay issues. Coming from the industry, I know what it really means. 

The third aspect is diversity. We work with urban slums that are home to people right from Himachal (Pradesh) to the Northeast, and down to Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Goa. They just do not belong to different religions but different castes and cultures. So, while it brings a beautiful, diverse flavor to all that we do, it has its own challenges. Life in slums is not easy. They have to battle it out for even their basic needs. So, keeping them together as a group is a continuous conscious task. 

Sonu: Thanks, Deepa. Your journey and work have had a significant impact on empowering underprivileged women. How does what then identify and empower these women, including the skills training and the support that you would have to provide for such people to come up? How do you measure the impact that it is had on their lives? 

Deepa: We train women on skills like stitching, crochet, knitting, embroideries, etc. For a woman to be a part of SVATANYA, she can know a bit of something, or maybe even nothing at all. All she needs is to have the desire to do something, to be willing to learn and earn. We have training, upskilling, production model centered around the community to facilitate the financial empowerment journey. 

On how we assess the impact that they have there on their lives, I can share some stories. When Salma didi was handed her first earnings, she had tears in her eyes. I remember becoming concerned, thinking that was she expecting more, or it was not enough. However, she said that all her life she had only been told that she was good for nothing; first by her father, and then by her husband, and this is the first time ever that she had earned money with her own hard work. The second time when we handed her the money, she teared up again. We told her, “Didi, it is time that you get used to it.” Then there is the story of Bindu, who proudly flaunted gold earrings she had bought from her earnings, or Aarti, a mother of two school going children, who came to us when her husband was out of work due to ill health. She became the sole earning member for more than a year, while her husband recovered. Just two days back, she had ‘grihpravesh’ of her own house that they built in her village in Himachal while celebrating her 25th anniversary. These are some of the beautiful, heartwarming stories that we get to hear. 

Sonu: Thanks, Deepa for bringing to life Salma, Bindu, Arti and many, many others whose lives you are impacting. What does success mean to you? How do you measure success beyond the sales, which is also critical to give the business enterprise going?

Deepa: Success is a relative term. For me, it means what impact is created in the lives of all our stakeholders. We do a lot of workshops with the corporates as well. These workshops are mostly for family day or employee engagement workshops. The long-lasting impact we create during these workshops – people come to us and say that the next time whenever they buy something new or discard something, they will always remember SVATANYA. Then, for us, success is when the students who we address, we engage them with through various programs, internships, when they get inspired through SVATANYA. For the women, success is not just financial empowerment, but much beyond; it is about how their families have been impacted. Husbands who were skeptics earlier are now supportive, pitching in with the household work when the woman is busy making her pieces. Children whose tuitions were paid by their mothers have now graduated. For example, Chandu didi, who works with us. Her daughter has a hotel management diploma now and is working for Radisson, Gurgaon.

Most of all, it is also the impact on the communities that the women have now started creating. My first ever flight was funded by NIFT, when they flew me from Chennai to Delhi to present my award-winning project, live at IGNOU, which was to be relayed across centers. 21 years later, these women have become the first ones not just in their families, but in their villages, to be part of team SVATANYA and to fly to Hyderabad, invited by Microsoft to conduct a sustainability workshop for 300 of their employees. They have earned this for themselves instead of just getting it as a gift. 

That is what really brought goosebumps to me; I could see the whole cycle starting from me and then culminating to these women, in a way. That is a beautiful success story for me.

Sonu: You mentioned Microsoft and how they supported SVATANYA women. How critical are these partnerships and collaborations that you make along the way for the success of the enterprise and for you as an entrepreneur, in particular?

Deepa: That is an interesting question. Much earlier in my journey, I realized that if you are in the development space especially, the impact cannot be driven by just a person. There is a very strong community aspect to it. Interestingly, our culture has always spoken about how we all need to be conscious of our communities, of our planet. It is very strong in our culture. Partnerships, collaborations have always been in focus at SVATANYA. I will give you an example. A socks manufacturing unit based in Palghar, Maharashtra. They are one of the biggest manufacturers and exporters of socks from India, making a million socks a month. The owner is a very good friend and I got talking to her and asked as to what they did with waste they generate. She told me that it mostly goes to a landfill. I said whatever you are sending to a landfill, send it to me; let me see what we can do with it. She agreed and one fine day on a Sunday morning, I get a call from a guy who said that my boxes are here. I realized that some 51 boxes had arrived. 

SVATANYA has been running out of my home, and the homes of the women to keep our costs as minimal as possible. I did not have space, which is why I reached out to a friend, and I asked if we could use her basement. Fortunately, there was space, so we stocked up the cartons. Some of the socks were mended and we donated them to orphanages but were still left with many. We started creating a whole range of beautiful soft toys using these socks and went back to Mustang and showed them what we had done with their waste. They loved the products and said that they would be happy to give them back from us, and use them for our visual merchandizing, gifting, even sales. Now every few months we get stocks from them, which we convert it into beautiful toys and send back to them.

Even brands are coming to us. For example,  there is a sustainable womenswear brand, which came to us because they wanted to become a zero-waste factory and cut waste. They did not know what to do with the waste, and we made interesting tactile toys and other products that work very well with children. And they loved it. That is another collaboration that we have done with this brand, using second-degree waste - cutting waste from waste fabric that they use. Possibilities are immense and impact gets multiplied manifold if you do it as a collaboration, is what we firmly believe. 

Sonu: I am honored that you shared that bit. What would be your message to other women who are aspiring to be entrepreneurs? What are some of the learnings that you have had along the way and what would you like to pass on to them?

Deepa: The biggest learning, which I shared for anybody and everybody, is to connect with that inner voice, that inner guidance – that is something I would really recommend. There is no harm in trying it, and definitely you will find it worth exploring at least.

For entrepreneurs, if they can impact the lives of people around them positively – people that you work for and people that work you – do your business sustainably, it can make a huge impact on not just in your lives, but also people's lives that you connect with and your touch. That is something which I would really want to suggest that people can focus, especially women can focus on.

Sonu: Thank you, Deepa. That was amazing. Thank you for sharing your journey, your insights and your time. Truly appreciate it. But before I let you go; our audience would want to know where do we get SVATANYA products from? Are they available to retail users?

Deepa: We are present on online platforms that focus on handcrafted, sustainable products, and we have our own website: svatanyaindia.com. We would be happy to hear from you, and in case there are any questions, something that we can do together, just reach out. We are just a click away. That is how I would like to put it.

Sonu: Thank you very much, Deepa. It was a great pleasure having you on this podcast. This is a wrap for today. We look forward to coming back to with another episode featuring another remarkable woman. Thank you so much.

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