::..:: ARCHIVES ::..::

As a school boy in Delhi, Jatin Singh ran a comics library. He would borrow books from people, and rent them out to his friends for a fee. To break the monotony of his algebra class, he would sell branded cashew nuts that he got from his salesman father. It is only now, as an entrepreneur, that he realises his real strength always lay in sales.

“I can sell anything,” says the 32-year-old, rather proudly.

And there are reasons to believe his confident claim. Singh has built a Rs 2-crore business selling information on weather. Yes, that’s right, a business out of weather – perhaps, the most boring subject on this earth.

Who buys weather information in India? Well, there are the 22 companies that make up Singh's client list, for now. “We provide forecasts to TV channels and newspapers. We also work with companies in sectors such as power, shipping, risk management and telecom,” says Singh of his six-year-old company, Skymet. You have only to flip to the weather pages of the Hindustan Times or The Telegraph and there sits in one corner the purplish Skymet logo.

Interestingly, power companies are also lining up to know how the weather will behave. Five power companies, including the Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Infrastructure Ltd in Mumbai and the Tata group-owned North Delhi Power Ltd in Delhi, are using Singh’s weather predictions to draw up their demand projections and, therefore, benefiting from buying power in advance at a lesser cost.

Most recently, leading cell phone manufacturer Nokia has joined the bandwagon. Its new application, Nokia Life Tools, comes bundled with the phone and is targeted at rural consumers in emerging markets such as India. The aim is to offer information on agriculture, education and entertainment, customised to the user’s location and personal preferences. Farmers in India, whose livelihoods are intrinsically linked to weather and commodity prices in local and international markets, are able to find the relevant information through SMS.

“We use weather-related data that is either available on the Internet for free, or we buy it from agencies, and process it using algorithms created by us,” explains Singh while showing the current weather reports at Palam and Lahore airports on their respective websites. His Noida office, incidentally, betrays no affinity to weather - there isn’t a radar in sight.

“It is all men and machines now. We have 44 employees, of which 15 are meteorologists, who work on the forecasts on their computers,” says Singh, of his workforce of ex-Indian Air Force men who work on hi-tech hardware and forecasting models in rooms aptly named “mausam” and “vayu mandal”.

It is hard to believe that this weatherman knew nothing about weather or the science behind its predictions till a few years ago. “My dad was my only connection with weather – he was a vendor to the Indian Air Force and the Indian Meteorological Department,” adds Singh, who after graduating in political science was all set to become a journalist. He even did an internship with CNN International in the US in the pre-9/11 days. Once in India, he worked for ANI, Aaj Tak and AP television. But during his last stint in 2003, his position looked shaky. His wife suggested he look around for freelance work. He took her advice – and the rest is history.

“I was very lucky. Within a week, I signed my first contract. I was commissioned to provide nice-looking weather graphics to Sahara television channel,” says he.

Other media companies followed soon after. In 2006, he decided to explore power distribution companies for his services, based solely on his instinct. “My wife was expecting our child, and would get irritated at power cuts. I noticed that every time there was a fluctuation in weather, the electricity would go off. While I didn't understand power, I realised there had to be some connection.”

So Singh wrote to the then CEO of BSES Delhi, a power distribution company owned by Reliance. Nothing happened for the next 3-4 months, but one day, he received a reply from its Mumbai office and he landed the contract to supply 15-minute predictions on weather. Using the data provided by Skymet, Reliance Energy has apparently reduced the errors in its weather forecasts from 7% to 1%.

It has taken him six years to grow his business from Rs 18 lakh to Rs 2 crore, but Singh’s not too bothered about the pace. “It is only in the last one year that I have become clear about what the potential of this business is and where I want to take it,” he says.

He is now looking at the bottom of the pyramid. “There are 600 million farmers in India whose livelihoods are dependent on weather. If I can get even 20% of them to pay Rs 5 a month for this information, that’s a cool $12 million in cash every month,” he gushes forth excitedly. That there is potential in the farming community has already been proven by the positive feedback on Nokia’s Life Tools application. Whether Skymet can exploit that potential depends on many factors, such as the investment needed to roll out this service to farmers.

His bigger challenge in expansion is that of people. “No one grows up wanting to be a meteorologist,” states Singh, matter-of-factly. Even now, most of his meteorologists are retired air force personnel in their sixties.

But challenges are for the weak-hearted. “Look at Israel. They created a country out of a desert. I like to think I am resourceful like them,” says he, rather optimistically, even though he had almost thrown in the towel, earlier this year, when the margins appeared the thinnest ever. But that’s no longer the case. “Now, I am going to make Skymet India's most successful power trading company,” he says.

Pretty ambitious, right? Unusual as it may sound - from selling weather information to becoming a power trader – the young entrepreneur is quite confident of his abilities. “If I can sell information on when to buy power, I can also use it myself to buy power,” he offers by way of explanation.

His head is buzzing with ideas about his business. And he is determined to get it right this time. “It has taken me six years to find my way, but now I know what I want. Look at the possibilities ahead of us. China recently seeded the clouds. Weather modification is an unexploited field right now in India,” he says.

Forensic meteorology is another potential area for Skymet, which is already working with a few insurance companies that process claims related to natural disasters. “Someone filed a claim for a blown shed. We helped the insurance company figure out the likely weather scenario for that day, and whether the wind on that day was strong enough for the shed to have blown off.”

Moreover, the implications of Skymet’s service on the carbon footprint of this economy are yet to be understood fully. Singh has recently been invited by The Economist to present his service at The Carbon Economy Summit in Washington later this month. He’s ecstatic about showing a video of how Skymet helps reduce carbon emissions.

There’s only one wish remaining: “I wish someone would give me a crore to roll out SE+, our ‘power of God application’,” says he.

If only the winds of capital were as easy to predict for this weatherman!