For Savarkundla, where roughly a third of the town is connected to one industry and everyone knows how everyone else is doing.
One town, one industry, everybody watching
Savarkundla is the weighing scale capital of India. The trade started here in the 1920s and never left: the town turns out something like 3,000 electronic and 10,000 manual scales a day, employs a thousand-odd engineers, and remains the only place in the country still making mechanical scales at scale. Roughly a third of the population is connected to it in some way.
That concentration produces a situation you do not get in a diversified town. Your supplier is your neighbour. Your competitor's son goes to school with yours. A bad quarter is not private information.
The specific pressure of a single-industry town
Two things come up repeatedly. The first is that changing direction is publicly legible - if you step away from scales, everyone has an opinion about why, and most of them are wrong. The second is that the industry itself is mid-transition, from mechanical to electronic, and families are split between people who learned one and people betting on the other.
Neither of those is a business problem exactly. They are questions about who decides your direction, and how much of that decision is actually being made by an audience.
What the work is
Separating your own judgement from the town's expectations of you. That sounds abstract until you notice how many decisions have been deferred for years because of how they would be read locally.
Sessions
Online, in Gujarati. The one in-person location is the Chandkheda centre in Ahmedabad.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this confidential? Savarkundla is small.
- Yes. No client is named, referenced or identified publicly without written permission, and nothing discussed is shared.
- Do I have to travel to Ahmedabad?
- No. Sessions with clients here are online. In-person is available at Chandkheda if you would rather, but it is not required.
