Seven-year-old Gurinder Singh had just entered class V and suddenly found himself struggling immensely with two fundamental tasks – writing and art. “Gurinder had never faced any problem in academic life. But complaints about him not finishing homework or not writing notes in the class started reaching us,” says Sandeep Singh, his mother.
This was in 2015, and Gurinder’s Hyderabad-based parents, Sandeep and Pavitter, were in a fix. Sandeep says they failed to understand the problem initially. When they asked Gurinder, he would only say that his writing speed had reduced and he was not able to cope with the writing pace of the class.
“We started analyzing his writing style and technique to realize his problem. Gurinder was left-handed,” Sandeep said.
Explaining the difficulty, Sandeep said, “For left-handers, writing becomes difficult as the hand blocks the view between the eyes and the previous word written in the sentence.”
Sandeep said the natural solution to solve the issue becomes to lift the hand to increase visibility. “The position of the hand becomes like a hook and is called ‘hooked position’, which slows down the pace of writing,” she added.
The problem went beyond just writing. For example, cutting paper with scissors in craft classes also caused difficulty in holding the scissors.
“We first researched stationery products specially designed for left-handers. They were all expensive. On an online platform, a pair of scissors cost Rs 1200!” Sandeep said.
This baffled Gurinder’s parents. While they could perhaps afford the specialized stationery, it seemed strange that more people weren’t showing any entrepreneurship in this sector. They were told the cost was high because the ‘left-hand’ market was too small for it to be anything more than niche manufacturing.
“But about eight percent of this country’s population is estimated to be left-handed. So, the left-hand population is about Rs 10 crore,” Sandeep says. They couldn’t believe Indian manufacturers were allowing such a market to just wither on the vine like that. And that’s where the idea of filling the gap themselves came to their minds.
Their first step was to approach several Indian stationery manufacturers. That went nowhere since the same old conversations of ‘scale and cost’ began to be raised repeatedly. The duo then figured they could get them manufactured and imported from the international market.
“We reached out to stationery manufacturing companies in France, Germany, and other countries and showed them the potential market in India,” Sandeep said. However, imports would have kept the cost high anyway.
