Recently, I had the opportunity to spend time with Prasad and Kiran Ji, along with other individuals, at GK91 Bioeconomy and VARHAD Capital in Pune. Prasad has seen the Bioceconomy field for two decades and shared many valuable insights regarding this space during the discussions. Prasad bhai has the distinction of having worked in the…
I spent some time recently in Pune with Sagar Padgilwar ji of Padgilwar Corporation whose family has been in the Agri equipment space for more than 70 years now for the last three generations. They have a fantastic business model call Kisan Machine Bank which can be very useful for farmer producer organisations in rural…
Visited Mahesh Londhe founder Agrozee recently who works out of a small village near Urali Kanchan. He is doing some great work in millets through Millet Adda and has more than 150 skus made from millets like ragi, kodo, bhagar, jowar, bajra etc. His unit is around 40 km away from Pune city. I enjoyed…
Great meeting and lunch with Parmeshwar and Nitin the promoters and founders of TECHENCE which is Poultry industry focused SAS Co. They are strong domain guys who built a software Company out of village near Rajgurunagar Pune. This is a bootstrapped and profitable company.The interesting bit is that the main promoter has only HSC level…
Met the absolutely brilliant team of 8 cofounders of a bootstrapped and profitable startup recently.All 8 are farmers kids and have built the venture by solving problems faced by their own family members. Shrilesh Mande is the brilliant leader of this team and I regard him as the Elon Musk of rural India!! Leading a…
I met one of the most amazing persons of my life today in the form of Shrimati Bhimabai Sampat Jondhale. Bhimabai is the promoter of a unique “Ajjichya Pustakancha Hotel (Grandmothers Hotel with books)” which is a unique format restaurant which has more than 8000 publications on its premises to encourage clients, especially youngsters, to…
Indigram Labs is one of the very few incubators in the country that solely focuses on food and agriculture. With the rise of startups in these sectors, what are the major changes you are seeing? Our estimation is that there are more than 1000 startups in this space trying to address solutions across all the…
With agricultural reforms under the spotlight currently, the government needs to consider a massive village-level infrastructure project with measures like enhancing the storage of produce and establishing gram mandis or haats. Not only would this add value to the agricultural supply chain, it would also empower rural units and the farmer community, ultimately leading to…
Education in agriculture needs to undergo shifts from a production mindset to a market-oriented mindset. Academics and industry linkages need to be deepened and strengthened. Academics and startups need to be in constant dialogue and collaborate to bring positive changes in the lives of Indian farmers. The FPO movement in India also needs strong support…
This can be the key to efficient price discovery so that farmers are ensured best realisation for their produce The National Agriculture Market (NAM) was envisaged as a pan-India electronic trading portal launched on April 14, 2016 completely funded by Central Government and implemented by Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC). The eNAM portal works to…
