Taking the road less traveled

A passionate travel entrepreneur has turned a small temple town in Karnataka into a social impact tourism hub.  

 Outdoor World Sustainable Tourism may have been in the travel business for over eight years, but it still remains a lean start-up. That’s partly because BC Kiran, the company’s founder, chose to keep it that way.

Driven by the adage, ‘One life, serve more,’ the charismatic entrepreneur wants his business model measured more by social impact than by revenue. Today, Outdoor World Sustainable Tourism is one of the few travel companies in India that focuses on ‘Voluntourism,’ a niche tourism concept.

Though set up in 2010, the conceptualization of Outdoor World Sustainable Tourism began way back during Kiran’s childhood. “I have always been interested in travelling, and some of the best times I remember are from my boyhood days are travelling from Bangalore to a small town in the Western Ghats where my grandmother lived. From very early days, I knew I would want to ‘travel and live.’ That’s exactly what I am doing,” says Kiran, now 42.