Sevagram General Store: The One-Stop Shop for Village Life

In Sevagram in the mid-seventies, the medical college was just six years old. There were neither big showrooms nor fancy shops, no cinemas or luxury shopping malls. Only one bus would ply between Sevagram and Wardha; a cycle rickshaw would take an hour and a half to carry passengers and a Tonga (horse-drawn carriage) symbolized a luxurious journey from the city to the village. Flipkart and Amazon India hadn’t entered the households. There were no cell phones, no computers, or television sets. And there were just two houses in Sevagram with cars parked in front of them. The roads were not tarred, and the street was not lined with electric lights.

Sevagram was abuzz with newfound riches. Knowledgeable people—trained in medical schools, upwardly mobile, articulate and ambitious—began to arrive in the village. People knew each other by their first names. Residents of Sevagram spent all their evenings with their neighbours. They were excited to see and host a guest.

Sevagram had a simple shop that met the daily needs of medical students, doctors, nurses and ward boys. All the roads in the village would converge and lead to the shop. The shop offered almost everything— pen, pencil, paper, pad, chocolates, toys, gift items, kitchen utensils, buckets, brooms, Britannia biscuits and groceries. What more would a professor from the prestigious AIIMS or PGI medical schools ask for?

The shop was Sevagram General Store. Mr Gulab Singh Baghel owned the shop.

He passed away a few years ago at the ripe old age of 85. I had known him for almost four decades but hadn’t had a chance to know how poverty and ingenuity shaped his life. Last week, I spoke to Sunil, his son, who inherited the enduring legacy of his business skills. The conversations helped me understand the real Gulab Singh.

Early Life and Childhood

Gulab Singh was born to Shri Raisingh and Kausalya Bai Baghel on 3 August 1933. The Baghel community is a Rajput community mostly found in the Baghel Khand plateau of Madhya Pradesh. Rewa Riyasat was ruled by Baghel Rajput. When Solanki Rajput from Gujarat came to Madhya Pradesh, the Solanki king Vyaghra Dev established the Baghel dynasty from Solanki. They migrated to Vidarbha long ago.

Born in Ekdara, a village 14 km from Warud taluka in Amravati district, he was second of the five siblings—two brothers and three sisters. Baghels are traditionally farmers. Little wonder his father, too, was a small farmer.

At age 7, he went to Adarsh High School, Anji, a village 16 km north of Wardha city. He dropped out of school after the eighth grade. In those days, he slayed with his maternal uncle in Sukli Bai and would walk 4 km to school, every day. His father, a Hamal (a porter) in the Ekdara village, migrated to Wardha where he kept on doing the same job. In his adolescence, Gulab Singh worked for a while in Kharangana, Sukli and Anji villages. Farming helped him learn the vagaries of life: “You will have good seasons and bad seasons. One cannot control the weather but be prepared for it,” he once said. ” Don’t shout at the crops and don’t blame them for not growing fast enough. Don’t uproot the crops before they have had a chance to grow,” he would teach his children.

In the early fifties, he worked in a grocery shop near Ramakrishna Hotel, Shivaji Square, Wardha. Finding the job repetitive and boring, he moved to Goras Bhandar, Wardha. Goras Bhandar was started at Wardha in 1931 by Mahatma Gandhi, Acharya Vinoba Bhave and Shri Jamnalal Bajaj. Taking care of and serving the cows was close to Jamnalalji’s heart. About 1000 litres of milk would arrive here every day and he served as an accountant for seven years. His ingenuity impressed the management and he earned a promotion—the post of manager. In 1954, he married Shantibai who came from Hinganghat.

Making a Difference: The Humble Beginnings of Gulab Singh

For the next six years, he worked as a manager for the Government Credit Co-operative Society. In 1972, destiny brought him to Sevagram. Shri Anantram from Sevagram Ashram recognised his accounting skills, integrity and hard work ethos and put him in the Gandhi Ashram where he began to look after agriculture and accounts. The pay was a little over minimum wage. In those days, he was also asked to look after the Goshala in Pipri Meghe, about six km from Mangalwadi.

He would regularly attend dawn and dusk prayers in the Ashram. He learned the virtues of simplicity and frugality in Ashram and his early days at Goras Bhandar, and later at Ashram. influenced him to wear a Khadi all his life. As one with a strong feel for numbers, he was a stickler for accuracy. He would not mind spending an entire night checking the difference of even one rupee in the account. He practised fiscal discipline and believed in the adage that money saved is money earned.

He was born in abject penury—and spent his adolescence living quite literally hand to mouth—but was driven to make a difference. He toiled hard in order to keep the household afloat. ” We would go to a school in Wardha from our thatched hut near the Sevagram post office and our father would pay us only one-way bus travel expenses. We would walk from Wardha to Sevagram—this is how he wove financial frugality in our fabric,” recalls Sunil, his son whose departmental store is one of the most sought-after stores in Sevagram.

At Ashram, he started helping almost everyone who tapped his door. Always conscious of his early life struggles, he generously offered financial assistance to those in need.

In 1976, Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan opened a fair price shop (also known as a ration shop) and was assigned the responsibility of running the shop on the young shoulders of Gulab Singh. He was tasked with the distribution of staple food grains, such as wheat, rice, sugar and essential fuels like kerosene at subsidized rates to the poor. People from the neighbouring villages would flock to him and he would be up till the wee hours trying to satisfy every customer who came to the shop.

A year later, the entrepreneur in his blood got the better of him. At the behest of doctors from Sevagram Medical College, he left his job and decided to open a grocery shop. The shop was located between the old and the new hospital. He was able to convince the Ashram people of the necessity of starting a grocery shop that would cater to the needs of local doctors, nurses, attendants and technicians.

Deeply sceptical of the idea, Ashram Pratishthan was a bit reluctant to buy the idea, but he was able to prevail over the reservations. He obtained their approval with a caveat—to keep the bare minimum stock in the shop. By then, the medical college was almost a decade old and the number of health professionals staying on campus was growing. Almost nobody owned a car and bringing groceries from Wardha town required considerable effort and additional expenses. Doctors asked him to stock not only the grocery but the entire range of household items. The Pratishthan, not willing to expand the shop, expressed its inability to fund the expansion. It asked him to delink the shop with Pratishthan and launch a new shop independently.

Starting a Grocery Shop

In 1976, Sevagram Ashram Pratishthan opened a fair price shop (also known as a ration shop) and was assigned the responsibility of running the shop on the young shoulders of Gulab Singh. He was tasked with the distribution of staple food grains, such as wheat, rice, sugar and essential fuels like kerosene at subsidized rates to the poor. People from the neighbouring villages would flock to him and he would be up till the wee hours trying to satisfy every customer who came to the shop.

A year later, the entrepreneur in his blood got the better of him. At the behest of doctors from Sevagram Medical College, he left his job and decided to open a grocery shop. The shop was located between the old and the new hospital. He was able to convince the Ashram people of the necessity of starting a grocery shop that would cater to the needs of local doctors, nurses, attendants and technicians.

Deeply sceptical of the idea, Ashram Pratishthan was a bit reluctant to buy the idea, but he was able to prevail over the reservations. He obtained their approval with a caveat—to keep the bare minimum stock in the shop. By then, the medical college was almost a decade old and the number of health professionals staying on campus was growing. Almost nobody owned a car and bringing groceries from Wardha town required considerable effort and additional expenses. Doctors asked him to stock not only the grocery but the entire range of household items. The Pratishthan, not willing to expand the shop, expressed its inability to fund the expansion. It asked him to delink the shop with Pratishthan and launch a new shop independently.

He had to pay back everything that he owed to Ashram Pratishthan.

When the going got tough

Completely thrown off balance by the unexpected turn of events in his life, Gulab Singh found himself on his knees. Not only did he have to repay the money he owed to Pratishthan, but he also had to inject fresh funds to make the new shop commercially viable. He turned to his relatives for support when things got really tough. Together, they managed to raise Rs 10,000. However, before he could invest the borrowed money, his relatives demanded repayment of their debts. He felt abandoned and confused.

But only for a short while.

Gulab Singh quickly gathered his wits and offered his wife’s mangal sutra—the only piece of gold that she possessed—as collateral for a loan from the Bank of Maharashtra. With the loan, he was able to repay his debts to Ashram Pratishthan and his relatives.

He threw himself into his work, living modestly and investing all his time, money, energy, and efforts into the shop. The shop was strategically located in front of the hospital’s main gate, with the central bank of India next door and the doctors’ residences just behind. This prime location meant that health professionals, patients, and their relatives would pass by his shop at least once a day and Gulab Singh exploited this proximity to the fullest.

As a result, his customer base began to grow.

Endearing personality and strong relationships with customers and friends

He had not read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People—the book was written in 1989— but he knew everything that they didn’t teach you at Harvard Business School. He genuinely cared about customers—and showed it. He would always put customers first, no matter who they were— a schoolchild, a medical student, a professor, a nurse, a patient or a patient’s relatives. “They are here to do business, increase sales and generate profits,” he would explain to his children why he valued them so much. I am not sure if he had ever heard this quote from Mahatma Gandhi, “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption in our work – he is the purpose of it. We are not doing him a favour by serving him. He is doing us a favour by giving us the opportunity to serve him.” but actively practised these words to the hilt.

Indeed, time and again I observed him following this rule,” The customer is not someone to argue with or match wits against—he is a person who brings us his wants.” Rajputs are known for their boisterous voices; we do not expect this degree of humility from Rajput.

Not afraid to break away from traditional models, he introduced new businesses to increase his earnings. Thus, when he heard that the medical hostel required firewood to cook food, he began supplying firewood to the hostels. To save expenses, he personally unloaded the packed truck and used a heavy axe to split the wood, and then transported it to the medical college hostel using a handcart. As his shop grew, he involved his three children and later daughters-in-law in the business. Although he may not have known about Mohsin Pabrai’s book “Dhandho Investor,” which details how Patels in the US succeeded in owning half the motels in the country during the 1970s, he knew how to utilize his family to manage the business and cut costs. It’s no surprise that he was acclaimed as the top low-cost operator in Sevagram.

During his four-and-a-half decade stay in Sevagram, his friendly approach endeared him to the customer’s hearts. Dr Sushila Nayar knew him well, as did Dr KK Trivedi, Dr ML Sharma, Dr OP Gupta, Dr AP Jain and Dr R Narang who became his most revered customers. His close friends include Bhoge Guruji and Kolhe Guruji from Yeshwant School and Subhash Deshmukh. Suresh Deshmukh, Pramod Shende and Shankar Agnihotri were his friends but he never took advantage of his political connections. He also befriended Shri Vishnu Borle, Thengeji and Chiman bhai.

Customer Service and Personalization

He was an extremely hard worker, putting in long hours every day. He would open the shop at 7 am, clean the merchandise, monitor inventory, track orders, keep accounts, and always be available behind the desk. Busy with his shop day and night, he had little time for recreational activities. He treated every customer with respect and had a knack for foreseeing their needs. Medical students, residents, and faculty found him unassuming, honest, and likable. “If I cannot run the shop profitably, no one can,” he thought, working as hard and smart as he could to make it successful. Although his business ebbed and flowed, he maintained his mental calmness. Money was important to him, as he was under pressure to support his four children, but he did not forget his social obligations. Over the years, he lent money to medical students, doctors, nurses, technicians, and attendants, seldom asking for repayment. He also helped poor customers whenever he could and had good contacts with doctors at the hospital.

In 1992, when the Central Bank of India moved to a new location, he rented the space and started selling gift articles and other items that medical students needed. He had a visionary mindset and dreamt of starting a school for poor children and industry. Although he was short-tempered, he was not afraid to speak his mind.

In his shop, whenever he eyed poor customers, he would try his best to fulfil their needs. Over the years, he developed good contact with doctors in the hospital. Whenever people from neighbouring villages ran into health-related issues, he would accompany them to the hospital, ensuring that they could access senior doctors,” said Sunil, his son.

Whenever his customers came to the shop to buy a birthday gift, he would remember who bought what, and would not only ensure that the gift was not duplicated but also suggest an item that the customer could afford.

He was a visionary and was never content with the ordinary work he was doing. He always had big aspirations and dreamed of starting a school for underprivileged children. He also had ideas about starting an industry. He had a talent for knowing whom to speak with and when. Despite being short-tempered, he was not afraid to speak his mind and tell things as they were.

The Legacy of the Baghel Brand

Fast forward forty years, and the Baghel family business has diversified into independently owned shops and properties owned by Gulab Singh’s three children and grandchildren. Despite the onslaught of e-commerce giants like Flipkart and Amazon, the Baghel brand has stood strong in brick-and-mortar stores.

A Father’s Love and Support

After his wife died in 1985—he was only 51 then—he didn’t let the shock of her premature death numb him. He looked after his children—Vijay, Bhupendra and Sunil—taking care of their education and helping them acquire and hone skills in the family-owned businesses. His love and support were instrumental in their success today.

The End of an Era, But Not the End of His Legacy

Mr Gulab Singh continued to work in the shop until his mid-eighties. Despite his passing on 2 August 2018 following complications from a broken hip, his legacy lives on. The Sevagram people remember him fondly, sharing stories of his wisdom and kindness for generations to come. Although he is no longer with us, Gulab Singh remains an important part of the village, a cherished friend and go-to shopkeeper for all who knew him.