Srikanth Bolla Speaker Profile

When he was born, neighbours in the village suggested that his parents smother him. It was better than the pain they would have to go through their lifetime, some said. He is a “useless” baby without eyes… being born blind is a sin, others added.
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Twenty-three years later, Srikanth Bolla is standing tall living by his conviction that if the “world looks at me and says, ‘Srikanth, you can do nothing,’ I look back at the world and say I can do anything.”
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Srikanth is the CEO of Hyderabad-based Bollant Industries, an organisation that employs uneducated and disabled employees to manufacture eco-friendly, disposable consumer packaging solutions, which is worth Rs 50 crores.

He considers himself the luckiest man alive, not because he is now a millionaire, but because his uneducated parents, who earned Rs 20,000 a year, did not heed any of the ‘advice’ they received and raised him with love and affection. “They are the richest people I know,” says Srikanth.
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Underdog success story
What is it about stories like Srikanth’s that so inspire and fill one with hope? Could it be the multiple zeroes after a dollar sign or the belief that you and I can achieve similar success if we set our minds and hearts to it? Underdog success stories touch a raw nerve. After all, everyone faces adversity, they dream, and they work hard. It is another matter that only a few cross the threshold of limits set by society.

In Srikanth’s case, it is his sheer tenacity that shines through the dark clouds of his misfortune. Being born blind was just one part of the story. He was also born poor. And you know what that means in a society like ours.
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In school, he was pushed to the back bench and not allowed to play. The little village school had no way of knowing what inclusion meant. When he wanted to take up science after his class X, he was denied the option because of his disability. All of 18, Srikanth not only fought the system but went on to become the first international blind student to be admitted to the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US.

Today, Srikanth has four production plants, one each in Hubli (Karnataka) and Nizamabad (Telangana), and two in Hyderabad (Telangana). Another plant, which will be one hundred percent solar operated, is coming up in Sri City, an integrated business city in Andhra Pradesh, 55 kms from Chennai.

Srikanth's personal goal is to “take the company to IPO.” A vision to build a sustainable company with a workforce comprising 70 percent people with disability is no mean task. 

When Srikanth was growing up, his father, a farmer, would take him to the fields but the little boy couldn’t be of any help. His father then decided that he might as well study. “In my parent’s entrepreneurship model, I was a failure. In entrepreneurship, we have a lean business model where we evaluate an enterprise and say how quickly it fails.” Since the nearest school in his village was five kms away, he had to make his way there mostly on foot. He did this for two years. “No one acknowledged my presence. I was put in the last bench. I could not participate in the PT class. That was the time in my life I thought I was the poorest child in the world. It was not because of lack of money but because of loneliness.”

When his father realised that the child was not learning anything, he admitted Srikanth to a special needs school in Hyderabad. The boy thrived in the compassion he was shown there. He not only learnt to play chess and cricket but excelled in them. He topped his class, even embracing an opportunity to work with late President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam in the Lead India project.

But none of this mattered much because Srikanth was denied admission to the science stream in class XI. He cleared the Andhra Pradesh class X state board exams with over 90 percent marks, but the board said he could only take Arts subjects after that. “Was it because I was born blind? No. I was made blind by the perceptions of the people.” Having been denied the opportunity, Srikanth decided to fight for it. “I sued the government and fought for six months. In the end, I got a government order that said I could take the science subjects but at my ‘own risk’. ”

Thus not ‘risking’ anything to chance, Srikanth did whatever he could to prove them wrong. He got all the textbooks converted to audio books, worked day and night to complete the course and managed to secure 98 percent in the XII board exams.

Sometimes, life mimics a steeplechase. Especially when it comes to those it has big plans for. It did not give Srikanth enough time to bask in his victory when it threw another spanner in the works. He applied for IIT, BITSPilani, and other top engineering colleges, but did not get a hall ticket. Instead,

He chose his battles carefully and did his homework searching the Internet to find the best engineering programme for someone like himself. He applied to schools in the US and got into the top four – MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon. He went to MIT (with a scholarship) as the first international blind student in the school’s history.

It wasn’t easy adjusting to life there, but by and by he started to do well. Towards the end of his bachelor’s course when the ‘what next’ question came up, it brought him back to where he had started.

He decided to give up the ‘golden’ opportunity in corporate America and came back to India in search of answers to his questions. He set up a support service platform to rehabilitate, nurture and integrate differently-abled people in society. “We helped about 3000 students in acquiring an education and vocational rehabilitation. But then I thought what about their employment? So I built this company and now employ 150 differently-abled people.”

​The boy who was born blind is today showing many the path to real happiness. He says his three most important life lessons are:
Show compassion and make people rich. Include people in your life and remove loneliness, and lastly, do something good; it will come back to you.

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