Tata Jagriti Yatra - ‘Enabling successful agro-enterprises: Our Agricultural Challenge’

In spite of a booming service industry, a majority of the Indian population today depends largely on agriculture and allied activities for employment. In addition to employment generation, is there also a possibility for agriculture to generate entrepreneurship opportunities? The CNBC Panel discussion on ‘Enabling successful agro-enterprises: Our Agricultural Challenge’ highlighted some of these and discussed the prospects of agricultural sector for today’s young entrepreneurs.

Even though farming has been the mainstay of livelihood in rural India, farmers have faced many challenges through the years and their problems have been more or less neglected. Considering the number of farmer suicides in the last few decades, there has to be something wrong with our present model and systems. It may also be an opportunity in disguise. The panelists were Kaushalendra Kumar, Founder, Samriddhi, an organization for self-employment opportunities to agricultural families, Gijs Spoor, Co-Founder, Zameen Organics and Professor Shukla, XLRI, Jamshedpur.

Ashwin Ranganathan chaired the panel discussion with great energy and put forward many thought-provoking questions such as why there are so few intrapreneurial farmer communities. The discussion also threw light on challenges of agriculture. The professor explained, “The first challenge is that the manpower and other resources have both remained largely unutilized. Even if we have vast agricultural lands, they are not used for farming for many reasons.” Gijs Spoor, an Agriculture Engineer from Netherlands, who is now working in the field of cotton farmer encouraging organic practices, shared his views, “What we need is to move underutilized resources to areas where more value can be created. In India, average plant size is about 1.5 hectare and 60% of the farmers are small and marginal farmers. The challenge is how to consolidate.”

Another important point brought to light pertained to xenophobia. How do you go to a farm community, as an outsider, and make them trust that you will solve their problems? What we need is innovation, as Kaushalendra Kumar expressed, “Every function in agriculture must receive proper attention. This is the reason why we have started marketing, branding, etc of even vegetables. We have installed barcode systems. Now we have started collection centres at the village level and procession centre in Patna, We have only one middleman, to ensure fairness to farmers. Such innovations are needed.”

The concept of fair-trade was discussed in great detail. An important opportunity for entrepreneurship in terms of fair trade comes from corporatization of mandis. This led to the point of how the customer needs to be aware of what he is purchasing, where the product has come from, etc.

Entrepreneur in Agriculture

Gijs Spoor comes from Netherlands. He speaks perfect Hindi and knows all about Indian agriculture. When asked why he decided to come to India, he jokingly says, “I am an Agriculture Engineer. We have 400 million farm families in India. Less than 1% people in my country are farmers. I have no work here!” Spoor’s story is an interesting one. When he was eight years old, his parents made a movie about farming. The Indian farmer from the movie visited them. The sight of his turban and Indian attire fascinated Spoor and he wanted to go where the man had come from. He studied Hindi in high school, and went to Jaipur to practice farming.

Inspired by an organic farmer from Rajasthan, he has created a way for farmers to raise the crop to meet. Zameen Organics coordinates large network of producer companies and extension workers who bring the control of sophisticated cotton production to the local level, so that small farmers owned enterprises can grow. Spoor also discussed possibilities of agriculture tourism with the youngsters and handled many of their questions about their agriculture related ventures. Participation from the youth can go a long way in promoting agriculture and giving it a new direction in India, a much needed respite.

- Unnati Narang