When Private Sector Means Partnership

In 2025, the Helvetas InElam project partnered with Mr. Vikekanand Mishra. By training, he is a textile engineer. By practice, he is a businessman who built Gayatri Pashmina Inc. from the ground up, today producing cashmere products for both national and international markets. His factory operates out of Lazimpat, Kathmandu, though he is originally from Birgunj.

On paper, he looks like a conventional private sector actor. In conversation, he does not.

Mr. Mishra often says there is a big difference between being a businessman and being an industrialist. Business, in his view, is about profit and survival. Industrialism is about building something that lasts and taking responsibility for the ecosystem around it.

His journey to that belief was not straightforward. After completing his bachelor’s degree from Amravati University, where he won a gold medal, and later a master’s degree in enterprise development in Maharashtra, he worked in a job for 15 years. But a disillusionment of security changed his path. A colleague he had worked alongside for years was diagnosed with cancer. As his colleague and family struggled with treatment, the company moved on as if nothing had happened. Mr. Mishra left soon after.

He tried entrepreneurship once, through a printing business, which collapsed due to fraud in partnership. Only later did he enter cashmere manufacturing, the business he eventually stabilized and grew.

Now in his fifties, he says he is no longer interested in business alone. “Charity should start from home,” he often says. First family, then community, then society. For him, giving back is far more than an abstract ideal. He says it is something that must be embedded in how work is done.

This is where InElam Project’s search intersected with his own.The project had identified nettle as a viable resource in Nepal’s hilly regions. Communities, especially women, had long processed nettle using traditional methods. Everything was right, the effort, the resilience, but it wasn’t lasting. The problem was that nettle products were being sold mainly through sympathy: stories of hardship, poverty, and survival. No matter how moving the story, or how necessary the income, such demand is fragile. It does not last. But quality does.

The product had a story but it needed a shift in how it was imagined. The story was always there, but it was not meant to lead. Like a performer who focuses first on the craft, the idea was to let the work speak before the struggle is explained. Like in any reality shows, when a performer performs with quality, the audience becomes curious about the journey behind it. And, when it revealed, they respond with respect that pity.

InElam was looking for a partner who could help turn nettle into a product that could stand on its own in the market, without needing a sad story to justify its price. A product that people would choose because it was good. This reframing is where the partnership with Mr. Mishra began to matter.

Mr. Mishra, meanwhile, had been looking for years for a way to work with institutions that operated on the ground. Places where people might not speak the right language of proposals and forms, but had resilience and a desire to build something of their own. He was not looking to donate. He was looking to contribute meaningfully.

The first conversation with Mr. Mishra began with banana fiber, when InElam’s coordinator, Mr. Krishna Lal Karna, approached him. As a textile engineer, Mr. Mishra immediately saw possibilities. More importantly, he saw people who were willing to work, experiment, and learn.

From there, the discussion returned to nettle- abundant in the hills, underutilized, and misunderstood and slowly widened to include garment waste, something already circulating through factories and workshops, visible everywhere yet rarely imagined as the beginning of something new in local context.

Seeing nettle and garment waste as resources was only the starting point. The harder question was how to work with them in a way that did not repeat old patterns (where raw material moves out, value accumulates elsewhere, and communities remain at the edge of production). The partnership began to take shape around a different idea: keep value moving back and forth, allow expertise and material to travel, and design a process where no single actor carries all the risk or captures all the gain. 

Under the current model, raw nettle collected by women entrepreneurs in Surkhet, Karnali Province, will be processed by Mr. Mishra, blended with the right proportion of natural fibers, and converted into yarn. The yarn will then be sent back to women producers, who will weave it into fabric and garments. At the same time, a local entrepreneur in Birgunj, Madhesh Province, will take forward what has already been tested, adopting the product and expanding production locally.

What makes this step different is not scale alone, but method. Garment off-cuts and textile waste, which would otherwise be discarded, will be carefully sorted, processed, and blended with nettle and other natural fibers. These remnants are not treated as leftovers, but as raw material broken down, reintroduced into the yarn, and given a second life as fabric.

In doing so, waste from the garment process transforms from being an endpoint to an input. This approach reduces material loss, lowers pressure on virgin fibres, and opens new forms of work, particularly for women, in sorting, processing, and production. Instead of expanding at the cost of resources, the enterprise grows by paying attention to what is already there.