Champions of sustainability: Three ESG women entrepreneurs on what going green means for them

From rural-focussed e-commerce platform Frontier Markets’ Founder and CEO Ajaita Shah to Tanya Singhal, an entrepreneur who successfully built and sold a 500 MW solar power plant, to Mahua Acharya, former MD & CEO of Convergence Energy Services Ltd (CESL), these women have defied all the odds to emerge as successful entrepreneurs in the environment, social and governance (ESG) space. Sectors that are usually considered as a preserve of men have benefitted immensely from the work done by these women in terms of the businesses and models they have created and their impact on society. Here’s a look at their journeys in their own voices:

Q: How did you begin your journey in sustainability?

Ajaita Shah: While working in microfinance, I learnt about the difficulties rural women face in gaining access to quality resources, including power, telecommunications, clean water, etc. This prompted me to work on tackling women’s social and empowerment issues.

Tanya Singhal: While at BCG, I attended a presentation that showed how covering 7.5 per cent of India’s deserts with solar panels could power the whole country. Then I joined a solar engineering firm in 2010 to understand how solar could work in India. I started SolarArise with a vision to bring solar energy prices on a par or lower than conventional power.

Mahua Acharya: I wanted to work with the government as I wanted to create impact at scale. For large countries such as ours, I wanted to do something that would make a difference in people’s lives.

Q: What is the area you ventured into? What was the desired outcome?

Shah: At a time when renewable energy was needed in remote areas, Frontier Markets was set up to provide rural women with quality products at their doorsteps and empower them to attain economic freedom. Initially, we invested in 500 sahelis to cover 100 villages. Now, our sahelis have become influencers in their communities, while also earning a stable income. They now connect with the rural economy to generate demand, collect data and coordinate deliveries.

Singhal: With SolarArise, I entered into the area of building and operating large-scale grids connected with solar power plants. My aim was to bring solar prices below coal and my analysis said that we will reach there in 10 years by 2019. We were able to reach sub-coal prices in 2015, beyond my own expectations. Solar today accounts for around 15 per cent of India’s power capacity and is now a vital part of India’s energy security.

Acharya: I wanted to make CESL the go-to agency for all e-mobility solutions in India. We zeroed in on electric buses, where I felt government intervention was needed the most. Since fares have to be kept affordable, we needed to find a way to make e-buses affordable for state transport bodies. The only way to do this is on a service model. So, we homogenised demand across states. Five of the nine eligible cities signed up for a unified tender. The results were unprecedented. We got prices that were 35-40 per cent lesser than a separate tender for each city. The government then asked us to scale to 50,000 buses and our second tender came out 5 per cent higher.

Q: What were the challenges you encountered?

Shah: When we first started in Rajasthan, we learnt that rural customers were finding it hard to believe that a private company would actually sell high-quality products at a low price. Scaling our model was equally challenging because without technology, we were physically going to new villages, building relationships with non-profits, trying to reach rural customers directly, etc. All of this took a lot of time and struggle.

Singhal: When I started, solar was priced almost five times higher than conventional power. Today, my plants generate power at tariffs lower than coal plants. Just like raising a child, for me, this has been a journey of grit and perseverance—there were times when things went completely off-kilter; we lost deals and investors said no—but I never gave up.

Acharya: A lack of resources and capital was a constant point of stress. A lot of people also said that the venture wouldn’t take off. It was a bet I had taken with myself—that it would not go bust; that if designed well, it would work. Eventually, each tender was worth Rs 10,000+ crore, which was a huge satisfaction to see them go through.

Q: What kind of scale have you achieved? What has been the impact on the ecosystem?

Shah: The Meri Saheli app is used by our sahelis to demonstrate products, facilitate online sales, collect insights on rural families’ requirements, and it also helps them earn. Leveraging these insights, Frontier Markets has partnered with 100+ companies to help rural families adopt solutions in clean energy, agri, smartphones, appliances, etc.

Today, over 35,000 sahelis have earned over $25 million.

Singhal: We’ve raised more than Rs 2,000 crore in capital—Rs 600 crore in equity and around Rs 1,500 crore in debt. We’ve built seven solar plants totalling around 500 MW that power over 250,000 homes and reduce 600,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions per annum. We recently sold the assets of SolarArise to a trust listed on the London Stock Exchange and returned multiples on investors’ capital. This milestone proves that solar is a sustainable alternative.

Acharya: In two years, we built a lot of scale with 17,000 e-vehicles tendered—12,000 in various stages of contracting—and 5,500 e-cars for the government, of which 2,000 are on the road; 100,000 e-three wheelers tendered, where 70,000 had financing, along with thousands of charging stations and one unique solar+battery+charger service way up in very cold Leh. These initiatives have changed the business model for e-buses’ procurement.

Q: Was it any harder being a woman? How would you inspire other women to choose this path?

Shah: The gender lens of investors saying that they want to invest in women entrepreneurs only happened a few years ago. So for me, the first seven years were very challenging to prove that as an Indian-American, I could crack the distribution challenge in rural India. But I found the right impact investor and steadily kept hitting my numbers to prove myself. Learning from my experience, I recommend women to never give up on their vision and believe in why they started in the first place.

Singhal: Perhaps my journey in solar is rewriting the myth that infrastructure is a man’s world. I did everything from inspecting construction sites in remote Indian villages to wearing hard hats and visiting Chinese module factories. I have built my team on the principles of empowerment and encouraged many women to join this journey. To women, I want to say that—be authentic and don’t be afraid to follow your passion. Dream big and don’t put a gender bias on your dreams. You must believe in your dream and be deliberate about it. It’s tiring, but you need to keep at it.

Acharya: Yes, I could certainly feel it sometimes, but I have trained my mind to not go down that path. It wasn’t always easy—and today, I would tell women that they need crocodile skin to succeed!

Q: What are the kind of opportunities available for those looking to drive this agenda?

Shah: Women are deeply influential decision-makers in emerging markets, so given the right tools, they will become able climate solvers.

Singhal: A lot must be done to make India a hub for climate tech start-ups and move to a low-carbon world.

Acharya: ESG is yet to become a serious topic in India. There is a lot of interest with many service providers engaged in the sector. But we don’t have a standard yet.

@AabhaBakaya