Krishna Mishra | Founder Chairman | Suvankar Mishra | Executive Director | eKutir
eKutir is a social enterprise specializing in technological solutions for the “Base of the Pyramid” market, in its first decade eKutir has successfully extended opportunities for a range of impoverished and marginalized communities, including over 70,000 smallholders. Farmers have gained access to crucial information, products, services and markets, increased yields and income, reduced food waste and seen steadily improving soil and ecosystem health. eKutir is India’s first certified B Corp that provides digital technology solutions anchored through a network of trained micro-entrepreneurs to accelerate sustainable growth in the farming communities.
In its endeavor to empower the rural communities, farmers, and the small businesses that are related to farming and agriculture, it has launched BLOOOM. This is an innovative platform offering a plethora of unique services that are of immense use for the farmers and agricultural sector. It can monitor spatial data in real-time, and microclimate data to predict local environmental conditions. This revolutionary application also keeps the records for land holdings and farmer’s end-to-end activities. Blooom is a flagship of eKutir’s foray in to the second generation of building a novel strategy and roadmap for smallholder farmer development. Currently operational in India, Nepal and Haiti, Blooom is looking at expansion in to Peru, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Kenya, Uganda and Philippines in the next 5-years. This application is widely used in India as well as in the neighbouring country of Nepal.
Flag-bearers of the Company
Krishna Mishra, a Social Entrepreneur and Innovator with three decades of leadership experience, is the Founder and Chairman of eKutir group of companies. Krishna has been instrumental in driving excellence from his wide range of experience in the domain of agriculture, sanitation and clean and affordable energy for the Bottom of Pyramid population in rural areas. Krishna is an alumnus of Delhi University, India and certified in “Innovative organizational model of farmers, Corporate Leadership and sustainable new generation Co-operatives” from Graduate Institute of Cooperative Leadership (GICA), University of Missouri, Columbia, USA. He has been inducted as “Ashoka Changemakers” Fellow in 2012.
Suvankar Mishra is the CEO and Co-founder of Blooom. He is a serial social entrepreneur and forayed into social entrepreneurship, straight after graduating from BITS Pilani. He is a TEDx speaker. Suvankar lead the enterprise to improve farm productivity and farmers livelihood using ICT (Information and Communication Technology). Suvankar’s core focus is on curating the future of food and farming by harnessing digital technology to connect markets to the billions of consumers. Under his leadership, eKutir has achieved multiple accolades. Suvankar is an alumnus of Stanford, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania, USA.
The Essence of the Enterprise
The company’s past 10 years is also the story of how the platform that today we call Blooom has been developed through a series of observations, hypotheses, on the ground testing and subsequent learning and refinement. In 2009, we started with the intention to create market-based interventions that improve the livelihoods of impoverished groups in rural areas, with a solution set targeted specifically at one of the most important segments, smallholder farmers. We identified access, deprivation to knowledge, markets, and services are the core problem, and hypothesized that a market- based, technology-driven solution can address it effectively and efficiently. At the same time, our observations suggested that most attempts at helping smallholders fail because they do not develop a genuine, micro-level understanding of their needs and constraints, and cannot engage them in a manner that establishes trust. With this in mind, we developed a model in which we trained and equipped members of local agricultural communities, usually better educated, progressive farmers, to provide soil testing and smart farming advice to other farmers based on our digital solutions, and to help them procure the recommended inputs. Instead of employing them, they were participating in our model as micro-entrepreneurs (MEs), running their own service businesses enabled by the training and the tools that we provided. In the initial phase of the project, we utilized project finance to set up these networks with a range of different implementing partners in a different environment: in India (in Odisha and Bihar), and in Bangladesh and Cambodia. At this stage, we sought to test the validity of the following core assumptions: Agricultural knowledge can be digitized and presented in a user-friendly way to benefit farmers, digital solutions can help farmers increase productivity and income, A critical share of farmers recognized the benefit and were willing to pay for it, New enterprises / entrepreneurs made a business and a living out of providing support for farmers using our digital solutions, Mutually beneficial partnerships were being formed.
Through subsequent iterations and learnings from its deployments, eKutir reached an inflection point to envisage that the future of farming needs an integrated solution, a comprehensive approach to an intertwined problem, i.e. – agriculture. Thus, this gave birth to Blooom, in partnership with Fairtrasa, a globally renowned Fair Trade Company based in Switzerland. Blooom offers an Android mobile application and a web-based interface. The app offers additional in-person services such as training and field demonstrations. Blooom creates a profile for each farmer, capturing basic data points including land maps, as well as socio-demographic data such as family size. It then tracks the use of inputs and crop protection as well as the amount and the price of the products sold through the platform. The product consists of two components pre-harvest and post-harvest modules. The fully integrated pre- and post-harvest platform via Blooom, is currently deployed to 2987 farmers in India and Nepal, involving over 300 micro entrepreneurs (in the new model Blooom Entrepreneurs). The farmers who are registered and transacting on the integrated platform have all been newly acquired, and key measurement metrics are showing systematic growth since the fall of 2018. Of the 70,000 farmers who are using older iterations of our solutions in India, Cambodia and Bangladesh, we are going to gradually bring over the 31,000 who are located in Odisha.
Awards and Accolades
eKutir is India’s first Certified B Corporation accredited by the US non-profit B Lab, which measures and holds for-profit companies accountable to the highest level of social and environmental impact. Company has been awarded by Ashoka – Innovators of the Public, RSA Future of Work Awards 2019, MIT Initiative on Digital Economy, Facebook & Internet.org Innovation Winner, 2015 and with many media coverages.
A Responsible Outlook
To ensure that smallholders will be able to tread the path, the enterprise’s platform provides resource planning tools and basic education on how to use loans for growth. The intervention that we are pioneering rests on three pillars: (1) Blooom, our fully integrated, soil to shelf tech platform, (2) our last mile enterprise delivery network, and (3) our ecosystem integrator approach. Our model is the result of over decades of years of combined experience in working with smallholders on the ground, analyzing the market barriers, inefficiencies, needs and risks that they struggle with, co-designing solutions with them, and co-creating impact with other stakeholders in the agriculture system. By addressing what we believe is the key factor that withholds smallholders, access deprivation – access to agricultural knowledge, high quality, sustainable inputs, warehousing, logistics, insurance, credit, and reliable buyers –, we can have an impact on some of the biggest challenges that the world is facing today. We share three top-level, broad impact goals, and the solutions that we have developed to reach society.
- Increase in inclusion and a reduction in poverty – Agriculture is a complex system, where only a broad coalition of players can achieve sustainable change. Therefore, our approach is to remove barriers, create tools that can strengthen stakeholders, and incentivize them to deliver pro-poor outcomes. We combine our last mile delivery network, relying on farmer organizations and Blooom Entrepreneurs, who are trusted member of their local communities, with our online marketplaces, making it easy for other market players to transact with smallholders. Blooom aggregates smallholders’ demand (for seeds, fertilizers or crop protection) and supply (their produce), enabling input suppliers to predict needs, and buyers to purchase ahead of time. These features create economies of scale and help companies to optimize their supply chains. Increased supply chain efficiency also reduces food waste. We perform a risk assessment, and we collect basic data and then subsequent transactional records for every farm, which enables financial institutions to assess the creditworthiness of farmers. To ensure that smallholders will be able to thread that path, our platform provides resource planning tools and basic education on how to use loans for growth. We rigorously vet suppliers and allow only high-quality inputs on our online marketplace. This, combined with our smart farming solution set, helps farmers increase yields and mitigate risks on their farms, including improving their climate resilience and soil health. The cumulative effect of all the above, is a significant increase in smallholders’ incomes.
- Increase in food security – Smallholders’ use of our risk mitigation advice and insurance increases their general business resilience. Their use of credit enables them to purchase high quality, sustainable inputs made accessible by Blooom. These, combined with the sustainable smart farming advice provided by the platform, improve their farms’ yields, reduced food waste and climate resilience. They also increase the nutrient content and decrease the pesticide residue found in their produce.
- Increase in sustainability – Smallholders’ use of sustainable inputs and best practices improve the climate resilience of their farms, as well as the health of their soils and their local ecosystems. This combined with increased efficiency along the food supply chain results in a significant reduction in CO2 emissions as well as an increase in the abilities of smallholders’ farms to sequester carbon. Blooom is currently deployed in India and Nepal. Our goal is to reach 1 million smallholder farmers by the end of the first phase of the project in 4 states in India, in Nepal, and in two additional countries.
Far-seeing Plans
In developing countries, smallholder farmers feed 60 to 80% of society, yet they are not fully a part of it. They are deprived of information, access, attention and respect. Their lives are steered by forces that they are helpless against – be it the below-market prices that buyers offer them, or the next drought or flood brought about by climate change. Currently, most smallholders are isolated from solutions, at the mercy of an increasingly hostile environment. Ten years from now, Blooom will educate farmers to act together and with a sense of agency, in a market defined by mutually advantageous relationships. More women and men will use the platform on their smartphones, instead of through Blooom Entrepreneurs. They will perceive technology as a natural, integral part of agriculture. It will also be natural for villagers to see women interacting with the platform and managing their own farms. And when farmers go to the market, it will be natural for them to feel like they are equal players and will know exactly what price that they can ask for. Through farming, women and men will be able to gain a sense of dignity. eKutir’s goal is to reach 1 million smallholder farmers by the end of the first phase of the project in 4 states in India, in Nepal, and two additional countries. The company is expanding its data science team and exploring ways to produce data insights that fill important gaps in the market. Currently, the company is developing three new solutions that address such gaps. The company believes that in the near future, farmers will perceive technology as an integral part in the agriculture and more future generations will opt a career in agriculture.
