Exclusive Mauve: Happened Over Coffee with Jeet Singh Arya | Host Priya Lalwani

In the latest episode of Happened Over Coffee, Mauve India’s signature conversational series, host Priya Lalwani welcomes Jeet Singh Arya — founder of Unexplored Bastar and one of the most recognisable voices in India’s community-driven tourism movement.

The Show

Happened Over Coffee is built around unhurried, coffee-table-style conversations rather than formal interviews. Lalwani, who is also the founder of Mauve India, has used the format to spotlight entrepreneurs, creators, and changemakers whose work rarely gets the mainstream spotlight it deserves. The Bastar episode fits that mould precisely — trading the glamour of typical business chatter for a grounded, on-the-ground story of building something from a part of India most people only ever hear about in the context of conflict.

Who Is Jeet Singh Arya?

Arya’s story is as much about a career pivot as it is about tourism. After roughly a decade in the corporate world — including a stint as partner and COO at an Ahmedabad-based research and consulting firm — he walked away from that path to return to his home region of Bastar in Chhattisgarh. What began in 2011 as a Facebook page became, from 2016 onward, Unexplored Bastar: a travel startup built on a social entrepreneurship model, designed to bring sustainable, community-based tourism to one of India’s least-visited and most misunderstood regions.

The mission is deliberately dual-pronged. On one side, Unexplored Bastar promotes the region’s natural landmarks — including Chitrakote, India’s widest waterfall — and its rich tribal heritage to travellers across India and abroad. On the other, it works to route the economic benefits of that tourism directly back into local tribal and rural communities, generating livelihoods rather than just footfall. Arya’s partner organisation, Arya Prerna Samiti (APS), has reportedly trained over a thousand local tribal residents for jobs in tourism and hospitality, with the venture’s impact now touching more than 1,800 tribal and rural youth across Chhattisgarh.

Arya’s efforts have earned coverage from outlets including Conde Nast Traveller, The Mint, VICE, and the History Channel, along with the Indian Responsible Tourism Award in 2023. He’s also a two-time TEDx speaker, using talks on climate, travel, and culture to make the case that meaningful tourism can also be a tool for changing outside perceptions of a region long associated with unrest.

Why This Conversation Matters

What makes Arya’s presence on Happened Over Coffee notable is the contrast it offers to the show’s usual terrain. Rather than a founder chasing scale in a metro hub, this is a conversation about building an ecosystem in what’s often dismissed as a “conflict zone” — and doing it by putting local communities, not outside investors, at the centre of the growth story. It’s a fitting fit for Lalwani’s format, which has increasingly leaned into stories of entrepreneurship rooted in identity, culture, and place rather than pure market opportunity.

For anyone interested in sustainable tourism, tribal livelihoods, or the broader story of India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 entrepreneurial awakening, the episode is a window into how one founder is trying to rewrite the narrative around Bastar — one traveller, and one local job, at a time.