Bharat Entrepreneurs

                                    In 2006, SEBI(Securities & Exchange Board Of India), the market regulator came down hard on new offerings of mutual fund. At the same time SEBI even permitted the trustees to govern according to declared policies that to approve new funds saying that the fund house does not already have a similar type of fund. AMFI (Association Of Mutual Funds In India) also reduced the funds initial expense upfront as against  amortizing  it over  a 5 year period. Inspite of   these plans , mutual fund investor even at  additional  cost didn’t give up to switch between the funds

            Even in last economic year (2007 April 2-2008 march 31) investors haven’t seen any profits from equity Mutual funds. Same was the case in 2006 also. Nearly 64,000 odd crore was released from equity schemes by investors flipping out of funds.

            Apart from these discussions, two factors which lead investors to dissatisfaction are: subscribing to too many schemes and excessive churning of their funds. Former is proved to be fruitless diversification as the great performance of  one scheme is neutralized by the poor performance  of another .Later is proved to be worthless  if you are interested in long-term wealth building. Reasons for the investors  to churn are profit booking and bad returns.

          Coming to the case of equity funds Broad Market which represents BSE, NSE indicators  had performed well when compared to equity funds .Out of 163 equity funds it has been reported that only 27 funds have performed well than Broad Market .If such is the case then it is obvious that Investors interest may diminish to subscribe  under a particular scheme to fund manager even at the cost of losing  some money as fund management fees and it is the case where Index funds are congenial. But considering the previous year reports Index funds are also not performing well. In this regard fund managers pushing the cause of ill performance on to ‘Tracking Error’ which is acceptable upto 1 or 2 %points. But Tracking Error has been recorded upto 5 to 10 % points less with regard to Index funds’ performance index.

            In view of fund investors, what they think is  :

1)If the fund managers are investing as per the weightage of Index in all shares  

2)Maybe in selected shares these fund managers are investing small amounts or large amounts.

         Considering fund manager’s situation, excess of churning keeps a tremendous amount of pressure on fund manager to perform. Not only that, if a fund is lagging behind in performance, investors tend to cash out which therefore forces  a fund manager to go for riskier equity investments. In this regard Swaminathan National Head(Mutual Fund) FDBI Capital says “ It disturbs  the investment rhythm of the fund manager.” So an advice to the investors is that short-term churning erodes maximum gains for investor due to short-term tax of  10% & higher  loads .So churning should be considered as a tool to rebalance or realign an investors portfolio.

        Finally experts say that even Index funds are not performing upto the marked  level, it is very congenial to Indian  Market to have  a minimum  investment horizon of 3 years in Equity  Diversified funds. If you being an investor want to build wealth over the long-term, stay put. One research paper reports that in entire corpus in 2007 December on some percent basis it has a cash deposits of 7.6% and in 2008 January has increased to 8.7%.Thus with a thorough analysis of stock markets  the conclusion is that a declining market is a good time to pick value stocks, while a rising market is a sound time to invest in growth stocks.

Popularity: 10%

Elephant droppings are the last thing an ordinary person would be interested in. But, Mahima Mehra, a psychology honors graduate student was more than just ordinary. With sheer determination she set up a production unit to manufacture paper from Elephant poop.

Sangner in Jaipur is famous for hand made paper. Mehra, right from her childhood was habituated to use that kind of a paper. After her completion of graduation in Delhi, she started developing different products from hand made paper with the help of Sangner people and she exported these products to different countries, especially to Germany for nearly 13 years.

One day, while visiting Amber Fort, she happened to come across elephant droppings on both sides of the road. As Amber Fort is one of the finest tourist places in Jaipur, people used to visit that fort on elephants. This explains the droppings on both sides of the road.

This was not the first time that Mahima came across elephant poop, but this time around she was very observant of the poop. She noticed the presence of fiber in the poop. She immediately got a brainwave to extract paper from it.

There was a certain Mr. Vijendra who supplied paper material regularly to Mahima. He listened to this idea and immediately agreed.

Failure followed by success:

Through ordinary means, Mahima was unable to separate paper from the elephant poop. Far from being discouraged, she started searching the internet actively and finally came to know from BBC regarding the production of paper in Sri Lanka. Atlast, after a tough one and a half year of hard work, she produced the first paper of such a kind in India.

Inspite of this tremendous achievement, she says that the biggest obstacle she faced was that of making people to use the paper made from Elephant poop. By ingeniously relating Elephant to Lord Vinayaka, she managed to convince the people that there was nothing wrong in using elephant poop to manufacture paper.

In the beginning, she directly participated with Vijendra and brothers in cleaning elephant poop as people initially were reluctant to touch it. But now, not only are everybody from the village are actively participating, they also are using the by-product of the elephant poop as fertilizer for their crops.

Mahima then started production of Book Marks, envelopes, bags etc from the paper in Delhi and also succeeded in selling her goods under “Nature Bazaar”. The brand name she used was “Haathi Chaap”.

She hopes for a bright future and plans to extend her units to south and east india where there are a lot of elephants.

You can check out her website:www.elephantpoopaper.com

Popularity: 100%