MBA students' experiment with marketing: to sell Gandhi's autobiography

"Copies of `My Experiments With Truth' will be sold at malls, cinema houses, corporate offices and other public places across the city," a Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal spokesperson said.

After reading the autobiography and realising the relevance of Gandhi's ideas to modern management, and also to learn marketing through practise, the Chetana students decided to sell 11,000 copies in a month, he said.

Gandhi's Autobiography is one of the highest-selling books in the country. This year, over 3.36 lakh copies of the autobiography, published by Navjivan Trust, Ahmedabad, have been sold in 16 Indian languages.

The students will sell English, Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati versions of the autobiography. Earlier, the students had set themselves a target of selling 5,000 copies of the book in a month; they met it within a fortnight. Now they have raised the bar.

The project, a part of their academic programme, is being implemented jointly with Bombay Sarvodaya Mandal, and is dedicated to the memory of veteran Gandhian, late Madhukarrao Chaudhari.

The students have handled the design of the programme, sponsorship, operations, marketing, permissions and sales themselves.