Kush Kumar Joshi

Managing Director * Nepal Ekarat Engineeing Co. Pvt. Ltd. * Mudbhary & Joshi Trade Link Pvt. Ltd. Executive Director * Mudbhary & Joshi Construction Pvt. Ltd.

People generally praise the showbiz duo MaHa. The parallel in the business sector is Mudbhary & Joshi, one can say. Friends since the college days, these two young entrepreneurs entered the business together some two decades ago and are still together. And in the meanwhile, they have also established themselves as entrepreneurs who stand for quality.

Before starting into Nepal Ekarat Engineering Company (NEEK) to manufacture electrical transformers, Kush Kumar Joshi and Ajaya Mudbhary were working as consultants and contractors for various jobs related with electrical engineering.

Among the two, however, Joshi seems to be more in the limelight than Mudbhary. The explanation is simple: To further the business, they felt that one of them has to be involved also in the social activities. As a result, Joshi started with affiliating to the Hetauda Rotary Club and later to the Makawanpur Chamber of Commerce and Industry (MCCI).

And it was this MCCI association that gradually put Joshi into the limelight. When MCCI decided to host a Makawanpur district level trade fair (Makawanpur Mela) to showcase the industrial and business activities of the district, which also houses the largest industrial estate of the country in Hetauda, Joshi was entrusted the responsibility to head the management team.

But Joshi changed the theme itself of the proposed fair and widened the scope of the event to cover entire Narayani zone naming it Narayani Mahotsav (Narayani Festival). The successful organization of the Festival, which was declared open by His Late Majesty King Birendra, resulted into Joshi being catapulted to FNCCI executive committee.

In FNCCI, Joshi initiated the Quality and Productivity Committee, which since last year has started an annual quality award called FNCCI Business Excellence Award.

Born and brought up in Chainpur of Sankhuwasabha, a remote district in eastern Nepal, Joshi had seen electricity while staying at Dharan, a Terai township where the Joshi family had its Terai home and business interests. And young Joshi was fascinated by electricity from early childhood. Though the businessman father wanted junior Joshi to become a civil engineer, the young man was more interested in electrical engineering, the subject he pursued after graduating from the Chainpur high school.

Joshi’s family was involved in business for generations, but he did not start his business with any of family money. "However, we’ve taken family help in later days", he concedes talking also about his friend and partner. The way they (Joshi and Mudbhary) managed was through consultancy in electrical engineering that they were providing right since they were students. The money they saved was enough to start the first contract on electrical installations. The ball that once started rolling was kept on rolling ever since and it snowballed over the period into a number of business concerns that they now own between them and in partnership with common friends.

Joshi and Mudbhary’s journey into the field of quality started with electrical transformers and their firm Nepal Ekarat Engineering reserved a place in the history of Nepal by becoming the first corporate business organization to receive ISO certification. That was ISO 9002 which was later converted into 9001. "Now we are going to get the ISO 14001 for environment in the month of March 2002", declares proud Joshi.

Talking about quality further, Joshi says, "quality is yet to be a culture in Nepal where the mentality of improvisation is still prevalent." However, those who are interested to pursue quality are hamstrung by lack of infrastructure, lack of government guidelines and the lack of public pressure. People still complain of quality being expensive. Hence the challenge is to convince the people that quality should be compared to the total owning cost (TOC), not the immediate cost.

Quality also means productivity. About productivity, Joshi says, it has to go top-town in Nepal. Though MBAs are working at middle levels of the management, the top-level people are still to be educated in productivity. Hence the emphasis on top level and the setting up of quality productivity committee in FNCCI, Joshi clarifies further.