BBA Program

Mid-Term Exam, Fall 2023

Principles of Entrepreneurship – Bus321

Total time: 80 minutes

Total Marks: 20

BANGLANATAK DOT COM: CAN ART AND CULTURE DRIVE SOCIAL

DEVELOPMENT AT SCALE?
Amitava Bhattacharya, the Founder and Director of Banglanatak dot com (BNC), a social enterprise
headquartered in Kolkata, India, in the last 20 years had become an engine of social change. BNC had
drawn a roadmap to transform one million artists’ communities and create large-scale rural micro-
enterprises in the next ten years. The organization’s Art for Life (AFL) initiative, which equipped rural
artisans with entrepreneurial skills and created a demand for rural India’s wide traditional handicrafts,
was noteworthy. For a large-scale expansion, Amitava Bhattacharya, the Founder and Director of BNC,
wondered how BNC would build the required capacity within the organization.

BNC OVER THE YEARS

In 1999, Bhattacharya traveled to a remote village in the Nadia district of West Bengal. He noticed that
many people he met during these travels were very good at singing, painting, or dancing, but worked in
random roles such as daily workers, bus conductors, or even shop helpers. He understood that folk
practice was a passion. Traditionally, remote rural communities used conventional mass media such as
newspapers, leaflets and brochures, radio, and television for generating awareness and disseminating
information. Many villages were media-dark, where access to even television sets was minimal. This was
when he realized that culture was a great platform to bridge the gap between communication and
development, he planned to use theater—not as entertainment, but as an educational tool. Bhattacharya
founded BNC in 2000 following 11 months of in-depth research for the preparation of an online database
of the different theater forms of Bengal. BNC built on the idea of engaging local folk theater groups to
build community awareness and create local champions for advocating social change. BNC began by using
street theater performed by local groups, calling it Theater for Development. This made it easier to reach
communities, localize content, take on local cultural forms, and break cultural barriers. By the end of 2001,
BNC was engaged full-time in designing and developing communication campaigns for the education of
the rural population on various social and developmental issues, and the program was renamed
Communication for Development (C4D). C4D specialized in designing developmental communication
campaigns that helped promote community education on health, sanitation, children’s rights (child
marriage, education, nutrition, corporal punishment, mid-day meals), women’s rights, human trafficking,
drug abuse, and environmental protection. By 2002, BNC had identified the need for soft skills and started
teaching theater games to address this gap. The introduction of theater-based capacity-building workshops
strengthened C4D initiatives, and BNC evolved from awareness campaigns to workshops. These initiatives
worked throughout Bengal and branched out to other states as well. Bhattacharya stated, “We innovated
many theater games, keeping the local culture in mind. The same theater games cannot be applied in
Rajasthan as in Bihar because the culture is different. I realized that cultural norms change every hundred
kilometers in India”. Language did not pose a barrier for BNC as the members worked with local theater

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groups. By 2005, BNC’s efforts had spread across 400 villages in West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha, and
Bihar. Gradually, organizations such as UN Women (The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the
Empowerment of Women), UNDP, and USAID (The United States Agency for International Development)
recognized the C4D model as a strong operational and assessment framework for public education and
capacity building that helped men, women, and young people gain awareness and become change-makers
in their respective communities.

Around 2004, Bhattacharya realized that merely spreading awareness about developmental issues was
not enough. Besides, BNC’s focus was on creating a demand for the performing arts. This led to “Art for
Livelihood” in 2005, which late on in 2009 morphed to Art for Life (AFL). AFL was started with three
components: building the capacity of traditional artists, providing direct market linkage access, and
facilitating collaboration opportunities with state, national, and international artists. BNC acquired
substantial knowledge of the culture of the Goa hinterland and rural Punjab in the last few years and
performed a detailed cultural mapping in Arunachal Pradesh, three states where it planned to apply the
AFL model at the earliest opportunity. In 2005, BNC started its first AFL project in West Bengal with partial
support from the Eastern Zonal Cultural Centre (EZCC), which is under the Ministry of Culture,
Government of India. It designed the project as an innovative intervention that would evolve and develop.
Having worked with local governance structures and government schemes, BNC realized that by design,
the government could not work in an integrated manner on its own without a partnership with civil society
or social enterprises. As government initiatives were mostly scheme based, their primary role was
restricted to facilitation and support. BNC mostly worked with the central and state governments in India
besides specialized UN agencies such as UNESCO, USAID, UNICEF, UN Women, UNODC, and other entities
such as the British Council.

The AFL methodology implemented multiple initiatives to address various aspects of rural arts, culture,
handicrafts. Some of them are detailed as follows-

TourEast: TourEast emerged as a platform for promoting rural cultural tourism, integrating experiences
through the art, artist, and village-based model of value creation, and creating evidence of tourism for
inclusive growth.

Rebranding Villages: By the end of 2014, BNC started to rebrand villages as cultural hubs, fostering and
showcasing the art forms unique to each area through village festivals. Village-based cultural tourism gave
a major boost to the sale of traditional handicraft products produced by local artisans.

MusiCal: MusiCal—was started in 2014 to support skilled village youth withthe resources and capabilities
required to identify opportunities and develop a career in the music industry. MusiCal aimed to develop
as a one-stop solution for folk-based world music, mainly to create a global market for the folk music
practitioners of Bengal and Rajasthan t. BNC conducted many workshops, presented collaborative works
and its traditional folk music in various international music conferences facilitated exchanges with folk
musicians, published books, and made documentaries.

Developing Entrepreneurship: By 2012–13, BNC had initiated a new vertical called Developing
Entrepreneurship to encourage social entrepreneurship. The Patachitra artists (Patuas) of Naya village
lived in abject poverty until a few years back. With the AFL intervention, BNC connected the Patuas to
urban audiences, and they started selling their Patachitras to customers in Kolkata. With the support of
the European Union project, artists built a resource center at Pingla Patachitra village in West Bengal in

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November 2010. The artists also started practicing their art on their walls, doors, and windows along with
various other diversifications.

BNC was funded entirely by grants. In its first year (2001), it secured grants worth INR 1.4 million, which
had grown to INR 85 million by 2016–17. There was a bigger challenge for BNC: to formalize its
engagement and influence across the larger ecosystem of interested parties, government, multilateral
agencies, and even corporates. These played an important role as funding partners for BNC on a project-
based model with varying objectives. Bhattacharya wondered how BNC could get corporates onboard its
ethos of “Culture as a route to social development.”

BNC’s marketing efforts yielded better results for entrepreneurs from major events, with two-thirds of
the revenue generated by product sales and the remaining one-third from performances. BNC relied on
village haats (over 50% of revenue) and e-commerce platforms. For performances, it counted on village
events during religious and seasonal festivals and fairs. As a social enterprise, BNC found itself continuously
innovating across programs as it tried to expand its reach. Bhattacharya said, “For social impact programs
to be relevant at the national level, we must design them for national scaling. We must identify programs
focusing on what they would achieve at a national level and check if they can operate at that scale.”
Further, some challenges were internal to the organization. Bhattacharya mused: “One of the biggest
issues worldwide in 'development' spaces is having a well-educated and motivated team with the zeal to
work with communities in marginalized villages. Although BNC already had a good core team,finding new
members who would commit to join hands and help meet the expansion goals of the organization was
becoming a major problem.

Part A (Broad Questions-Based on the Case) (Answer both questions)

Q1: How cultural diversity & local theater act as opportunity for BNC? Using Mullin’s seven
domain model, perform feasibility analysis only on the micro and macro level industry domains
for BNC. (8 Marks)

Q2. Discuss each of these components with reference to BNC’s business model - Customer
segment, customer relationship, Cost Structure, revenue stream, Key partners. [DO NOT draw the
canvas] (8 marks)
Part B (Short Question- Answer any 1 question out of 2) (4 Marks)
Q1: Discuss how “Entrepreneurial Intensity” set an Entrepreneurial firm from a conservative
firm apart? What are the expressions of “Entrepreneurial Intensity”?
Q2: “Industries that are young rather than old, are early rather than late in their life cycle, and are
fragmented rather than concentrated are more receptive to new entrants than industries with the
opposite characteristics.” What do you understand by this statement?