13 year old Tilak Mehta, grade 8 student of Garodia International Centre for Learning Mumbai recently made headlines by winning the Youngest Entrepreneur in the Logistics Sector title at the third edition India Maritime Awards for his start up Papers N Parcels launched in July, 2018.
At a tender age when most students are caught juggling between their routine of school life and studies, Tilak has managed to stand out from the crowd as a prodigy and crafted a niche for others to emulate.
A budding entrepreneur, Tilak wanted to ease the bottlenecks he personally faced when he wanted to get his books couriered within the city the same day. The challenges he faced were either on the delivery front where the charges were too high or they fell short on the same day commitment for delivery. Pondering upon this helped him to come up with an idea of initiating something that would carry small parcels and papers within the megapolis for assured intra-day delivery of goods. It paved the way for Papers N Parcels (PNP) from thereon.
Tilak decided to ‘uberise’ the courier service by using mobile based software to leverage a network of 5000 dabbawalas. This meant that the deliveries could be made for prices as low as Rs.40 to a maximum of Rs.180. Any customer can log on to the app and place an order for the consignment.
At the recently held Forbes Leadership Awards 2018, Tilak was one of the panelists of entrepreneurs to be interviewed by Indian entrepreneur and philanthropist Ronnie Screwvala, who saw an extraordinary spark in the teenager to make a difference. Thereafter, he also recognised the effort he put behind his idea which took shape in PNP.
Commenting on his entrepreneurial journey, Tilak said, “The idea to become an entrepreneur was ingrained into me thanks to my education at Garodia International Centre for Learning Mumbai which taught me the art of entrepreneurship at an early age through exposure to the world-class curriculum. I owe most of it to my school which has been grooming me to take upon the challenges of life and come up with innovative solutions to deal with real life situations, a need of the hour.”
“We are very happy to see Tilak address such a pertinent issue most of us face on a day to day basis and also generate an additional source of income for the dabbawalas. He also strikes a balance between his schooling and business, while he devotes the week towards school academics and activities and the weekends to his business. He has also shared his experience of managing his work on a day to day basis and sought our advice as well on the same,” said Nishant Garodia, director, Garodia International Centre for Learning Mumbai.
Currently, PNP has 300 registered dabbawalas working as part of the delivery team, besides 180 of its own team. The start-up is completely bootstrapped by Tilak’s father’s company Rushabh Sealink, a parent company of PNP. The company is currently handling 1,200 deliveries a day. The business model is based on dabbawalas making deliveries after their usual food delivery shifts. The business model for the company is B2B, B2C and C2C all of which they aim to foray into. The company is currently targeting 1 lakh deliveries per day by the end of 2019 and plans to employ around 2000 people.