What started for a 26 year old Arul Sekar P., an alumnus of IIT Chennai, as a passion for adventurous treks has today grown into an Enterprise of Adventure Sports operating in and around Tamil Nadu. The profits might just be enough to sustain and keep the ball rolling but for some Adventure freaks, the thrill of the rock climbing, rafting, bungee jumping and parachuting is life and work.    

As the new Budget offers some chills and thrills to the Adventure junkie, with tax break to suffice only for some skydiving sessions, many young Entrepreneurs are taking their passion a step ahead and starting low to sustain and reap profits in Adventure Sports. The leisure industry in India has been opening up avenues for spending; grabbing this opportunity, the budding entrepreneurs lately are steaming up in introducing learning programmes based on adventure sports as a way of instilling popular values of team building, problem solving and handling criticism.

“The focus is primarily on simple exercises like Sequence climbing where the team effort leads to reaching a goal. In some of our programmes, the element of adventure is integrated to further remove participants from their comfort zones, thereby enabling them to take risks both physically and emotionally which cannot be achieved in an indoor session,” says Arul, the founder of ecoLogin. Having started two years back, ecoLogin provides with a diverse set of getaways that range from wildlife and jungle retreats to adventure activities including rural tours and heritage walks.

The concept propels around the fact that adventure involves an element of surprise, an engagement that leads to experiences. These experiences exist as both, failure and success, and both are equally instructive. This field of operation promises a safe environment where the participants can speak their mind out and push themselves to new limits.

“An outbound training is far from a corporate atmosphere and hence the contacts and interactions are more genuine and sans the corporate code,” says Aseem Yash Bhatia, an employee at Infosys. 

On being asked how learning through adventure can be a good HR training exercise, Divya Pareek, Psychologist and a social worker explains, “When an individual participates in such an activity he/she uses a variety of intelligences: linguistic, physical, interpersonal and intrapersonal. The participants are later asked to step outside the activity and look at the experience and their roles in it. It is found that experiential learning fosters and strengthens trust, creating an ideal environment for groups with diverse behavioral styles which suits best to the corporate culture.” However, some Psychologists are of the opinion that long term behavioral changes cannot be brought about by these weekend exercises.  

 Talking of finances and sustainability for starters, Sridhar Lakshmanan, co-founder of ecoLogin, reflects, “Our focus is to use local resources as much as possible like boarding and lodging with the villagers on the way, thereby, bringing down the cost of operation. We share our profits with them and hence there is a mutual benefit.”

The publicity for such adventurous sessions is through word of mouth or personal contact. The operational team could be as small as a single trained adventure enthusiast keeping the initial investment real low.

Challenge By Choice, another start-up based out of Indore is unique for it aims to cater to the school children and self help groups that cannot afford the luxury of such a lesson. “Taking up a Challenge by Choice encourages an individual to respect thoughtful choices. It recognizes the need for individuals and the group to accept responsibility for decisions that they make,” exclaims a young Sanjay Bajaj, a Bio-medical engineer who quit his job to structure his passion into a feasible business plan. Having organized a number of such camps while in school and college, Bajaj is a one man army credited to have organized outbound training programmes for ICICI, Proton and UNICEF by himself and with the help from other adventure enthusiasts.

Although the concept took pace almost recently, but the oldest of Adventure Sports Company can be traced back to 1993.  Wildrift Adventures has come a long way from a mere service to a vehicle for regional development and environmental consciousness among larger groups. “Mobilizing the locals and tribes in and around adventure spots could be a potential source of revenue for them as well as for us who share this passion,” says a shy Bajaj.