In fifth standard, Durgesh saw a television inside a tailor’s shop, and something in him canted towards it.
The shop was near the rented house his family lived in, one of those neighbourhood spaces where customers drift in and out, and children hover at the door. The tailor noticed him watching from the threshold and invited him in. One day, he also gave the boy a needle and cloth.
Durgesh went back every day. By the tenth standard, he could stitch pants and shirts, blouses and salwar kurtis, even wedding suits. In the wedding season, he travelled to nearby areas, taking urgent orders, working late to meet deadlines. Everyone in his family worked; tailoring was his way of adding to the household’s income.
from stitch to signal
Then another screen appeared. An uncle who worked as a wedding videographer let him tag along. He held the lights, managed cables, and switched equipment on and off. The TV in the shop had been the first window into images. The camera was a way to make them.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, a third object entered his life: a computer.
His older brother suggested a basic course at a small institute. He signed up. The first time he saw Windows 98, and later Windows 2000, he felt the same pull he had felt towards the TV and the camera. He wanted to know how it all worked.
He learnt how to operate a machine and not much else, but it opened a door wide. He began dismantling and reassembling hardware, learning to repair systems, solving problems in tiny increments. Tailoring was now in the past, videography on weekends. Computers took over his imagination.
When a private contractor began hiring data entry operators for the State Bank of India, he applied. The job was simple enough. Maintain customer data for online banking, and fix the occasional machine. A few years of this quietly taught him how systems run, how people rely on them, how failure looks when a line goes down.
In March 2009, he tried to turn that education into a business. He called it Hybrid Computer Solutions and Cyber Zone.
The name came from a dictionary. He did not fully understand the word “hybrid”, just liked the sound of it. He rented a small space, built a few cubicles by hand, and set up a service counter. He secured lines from BSNL and Airtel. It was a computer repair shop and a cyber café, run with a friend who was equally interested in what the Internet could do.
Connectivity was still a novelty in his town, Guna. People came to check email, fill forms, browse. Demand was strong. What he lacked was financial literacy. Private loans funded the entire setup. Within a year, the numbers stopped adding up.
“I was barely twenty” he says now. “I didn’t understand business finances.” When he could no longer repay the loans, he had to shut down the café. For a while, it felt like everything he had tried to build had dissolved.
His friend Surbhi suggested Ahmedabad.
a city that taught scale
Durgesh went the next day, found a computer maintenance job through a newspaper advertisement, and was hired as a customer support engineer on a salary of ₹7,000 a month. Working in a metro city, he saw, for the first time, how larger companies organised themselves, how teams and systems could grow beyond one room. He told himself he would start again, learn everything he needed to, and repay his debts.
Around the same time, he discovered that the internet could travel through the air. That even hardware like CCTVs could work wirelessly. Until then, connectivity in his world meant wires: telephone lines, cables, plugs.
He moved back to Guna to use his newfound knowledge dusting off his previous company to offer networking and wireless security solutions.
A chance encounter during a CCTV support call introduced him to folks from the Digital Empowerment Foundation who delivered internet connectivity to this centre wirelessly to this computer centre.
He began reading whatever he could find on wireless technology. For nearly a year and a half, he studied how signals moved, what kind of terrain blocked them, and what hardware was needed. At some point, the study turned into a plan. He was hooked.
a hill, a temple, a relay
The town had one clear advantage: a small hill just outside the city, topped by a temple, high enough to serve as a relay point. From there, antennas could broadcast a signal tens of kilometres in every direction, reaching villages and small towns with little or no connectivity. There was demand. People wanted the internet for work, study, entertainment. Nobody had to be convinced.
In March 2015, he started Hybrid Internet Services.
At first, it was just him, some small loans, and a handful of connections. Within a year, he had linked nearby towns. The model was simple and, for the first time in his life, recurring. Money from subscriptions arrived every month. The work was technically demanding and logistically complicated, but the need was constant.
In September 2016, after a particularly hopeful phase of growth, he went out with friends and got his first tattoo: a Wi-Fi symbol.
It was impulsive, but not random. For him, the symbol marked the moment he realised he might have found something that could sustain him, something he could build on patiently. Over the next two years, he connected dozens of villages and small towns, watching the networks spread outwards from the hill.
Through that work, he met two people who would change the scale of his ambition: Jinesh and Harsh.
They ran a company that had built hotspot management software, the kind that sits invisibly behind public Wi-Fi systems in airports and railway stations. They were looking for an internet service provider to handle bandwidth and backend services. Durgesh, separately, was looking for hotspot software to support his idea of community Wi-Fi.
The fit was obvious.
Because Hybrid Internet already had a working ISP model with links, licences and systems, Harsh suggested they start sharing their experience more widely. They set up a website offering consultancy to new entrepreneurs who wanted to start internet services. Between 2017 and 2019, they wrote about licences, technical setups, tools, software, pricing, common mistakes. They took calls and travelled to see small ISPs in person.
Demand for that knowledge turned out to be scattered all over the map. They began advising operators in Madhya Pradesh and the Northeast, then further afield. They saw the same pattern in different places: enormous need, limited information, and a few dominant players charging high prices in the absence of competition.
distance as a business model
Mizoram was the turning point.
Remote and difficult to reach by road, it had some of the highest internet use in the country. Data consumption was high. So were prices.
“In 2019, ISPs charged ₹1,000 for a 1Mbps plan,” Durgesh says. “While on the mainland people had access to 50 Mbps for ₹500.”
The gap was less about greed and more about isolation. Operators lacked access to better bandwidth deals, newer hardware, or updated legal frameworks. There was, as he puts it, no bridge between providers and solutions. By sharing their knowledge and supply chains, Hybrid Internet helped shift the baseline: selling products at ₹200 that others were marking up to ₹1000, aggregating demand, and negotiating better rates.
Today, the company serves roughly 60-65,000 households, through 200 plus local ISP partners in over 150 villages. Their largest presence remains in Mizoram, but their footprint extends across much of the Northeast and into parts of Ladakh and Madhya Pradesh. A recent all-India licence has opened the way for slower, more deliberate expansion into other states.
The core of the model has not changed. Hybrid Internet focuses on wireless connectivity, especially in terrain where fibre-optic cables are hard to lay. Last-mile delivery is community-driven: in each village or town, they work with a local entrepreneur who manages customer relations, installation, and basic troubleshooting, usually under a revenue-sharing arrangement. The central team of about 10 people tackles legal, technical, and bandwidth support.
“Locals prefer working with someone they know,” he says. “We just make it possible.”
the tattoo was prescient
As grounded as Durgesh is, the stories of the change his work has set in motion have a place among the stars.
Like Manjushree School in Tawang, Arunachal Pradesh, which is run by Buddhist Lamas for orphaned and underprivileged children, funded by donors abroad, it had smart classrooms and no internet. No mobile network either. A donor reached out. After a survey and weeks of planning, they connected the school wirelessly. It was their first project in Arunachal. Today, Tawang is their largest node, with connections to households, hotels, offices, and other schools.
Or Sangti village, where locals had built homestays for tourists but kept losing visitors because there was no connectivity. “They asked us more than twenty times to bring internet,” he says. They launched there in 2024. Since then, the village has seen growth in tourism, online education, and even a few local influencers.
He is clear that what they are solving is, first, an access problem. “Primarily access,” he says. “That’s the biggest barrier. Once access exists, affordability follows.” In places like Ladakh, they design small, low-cost systems that one person can manage, ensuring that villages with 25-100 households can sustain a connection. Commercial users, such as businesses, hotels, and homestays, often cross-subsidise household plans.
From the outside, it is easy to frame this as social work. Inside the company, the language is more modest.
“Nobody does anyone a favour,” says Harsh, his co-founder. “We gain far more from communities than we give. They change us.”
Durgesh himself is as unassuming as they come. Colleagues describe him as “full of character and principles”, “a textbook good human”, “a mentor”, “a brother”. The traits they return to – patience, calmness, a belief that intention matters – echo what his life has looked like: long periods of waiting, careful experiments, a willingness to start again after failure.
Arpit, who first met him in 2004 when Durgesh stitched him a pair of bell-bottom trousers, remembers one line in particular: agar aapki niyat achhi hai to aapke saath galat nahi hoga, aur agar galat hua bhi to kuch naya sikhake jaayega. If your intention is good, nothing bad will happen to you, and even if something does go wrong, you will learn something new from it.
That attitude has held through the café collapse, the debts, the learning curve of wireless networks, the road trips across rough terrain, and the slow process of writing down what he knows so that others can use it. He has tried more formal learning systems, but still finds that the most effective teaching happens the old-fashioned way: phone calls, on-site visits, letting people learn by doing.
The longer-term vision is proliferation, something that came about from close collaboration with last-mile operators and a clear view of what they need to grow independently in a sector dominated by big telcos. He imagines a set of practical guides, simple enough for someone in a village to set up and grow an ISP on their own, even in the remotest parts of India.
beyond the signal, a second life
Over the last two years, another practice has taken root alongside the routers and road trips: the flute.
In August 2023, he began learning Indian classical flute in the Maihar gharana tradition, first through online classes with musician Kartikeya Vashisht, later by travelling to Delhi for longer, in-person sessions. Kartikeya talks about him in the same terms others do: disciplined, hard-working, prepared, willing to sit for hours without looking at the clock.
For Durgesh, the flute is “a new life”, a practice that runs alongside his work. He carries it when he travels, plays folk tunes at local gatherings, and watches how music quietly changes the way communities see him.
Asked what success looks like now, he does not talk about numbers. He talks about being able to help people, “by contributing to society using the resources, knowledge, and guidance I’ve gained from people, travel, and lived experiences.” Most of all it is about shrinking the distance between a village and the rest of the world.
On some evenings, he practices the flute while his infant son sings along; on others, he is on a call with a village entrepreneur, troubleshooting a link. Somewhere in between, towers are installed on small hills, antennas point towards each other across valleys, and in homes that were once silent, a modem light begins to blink.
