DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Yes, it is true that you can make money with dung. But not just any dung here; we are talking about elephant dung.

For the uninitiated, elephant dung is no ordinary dung. It has several uses besides the mostly commonly known use which is of course paper making. The multi-purpose elephant dung is used for making paper products, bio-fuel, nutritional manure, mosquito repellent, etc. 

Late but finally there, entrepreneurs in India are starting to experiment with the ideas which have long been successfully executed in the West. 

Today, collecting elephant dung and selling them is a popular revenue model in the rural villages in India. Many NGOs buy the dung from the villagers and sell it to the organisations that make use of it. Villagers also sell it directly to people as mosquito repellent in markets. They in fact, find it more lucrative than farming. Manu from the village of Sonepur in Bihar says that, “By selling balls of elephant dung we sometimes even make Rs 100 in a day.”

Many entrepreneurs are also trying to turn this shit industry into a no-shit  industry. A Mumbai-based entrepreneur Nilima Chaubey along with her business partner Jeet Rana, a handmade paper producer from Udaipur, make a range of products from elephant dung - notebooks, photo albums, frames, bags, gift tags, stationery and tea coasters - all priced between Rs 10 and Rs 350. And she is not the only entrepreneur in the market today but there are hoardes. 

In fact, sometime back some students Students of biotechnology engineering of Sahrdaya College of Engineering and Technology, Kodakara in Kerala, came out with a novel project to convert elephant dung into useful bio-products such as paper, briquette, biogas etc. The project will take care of the huge quantity of elephant dung generated at the Anakotta of Guruvayur Devaswom which otherwise disposed by dumping at landfills or by burning.

So if you have kept your hands off the shit wait no longer and dig in to find your share of profit.