Avigna Group’s Abhijit Verma wants to provide farmers with opportunities through conscious capitalism

According to the 2018 Global Hunger Index, India ranks 103 out of 119 countries on the list. The United Nations’ (UN) Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 194 million Indians go hungry every day. 

The main reason – food wastage and the fact that more than 40 percent of food (worth $14 billion or €12.42 billion) produced is wasted even before it reaches the people.

“In a post-harvest scenario, the farmer faces three primary challenges,” says Abhijit Verma, Executive Director and CEO, Avigna Group, the multimillion-dollar group spanning verticals such as infrastructure, real estate, textiles, and education.

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“The first is immediately after the harvest when he has to take his produce to market. Conventional transport systems are prohibitively expensive and any delay costs even more,” he says, explaining that disruptions that aggregators like Ola and Uber brought to commuting are not available in the market.  

Abhijit says that once the farmer reaches the nearest mandi or Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) market, their entire harvest isn’t purchased as most markets don’t have the required storage facilities.  

“So, the farmers have to store it themselves or take the produce to the Food Corporation of India (FCI) or a similar organisation’s central storage system. But this takes time. The challenge for the farmer now is that he needs to wait. And because he is dealing with a perishable commodity, the quality of the product is going down. Now, you can relate that to why farmers are throwing tomatoes on the road or burning sugarcane on the road. That is when I realised that I had to do something,” he says. 

A comprehensive storage solution

In keeping with this idea of revolutionising the traditional mandi, the Avigna Group has laid the foundation for India's first-of-its-kind Food Terminal Market built over 26 million sq ft in Madhya Pradesh and 15 million sq ft in Tamil Nadu with a budget of Rs 6,000 crore.

“We tied up with one of Europe's largest consumption players to share their expertise and know-how. They stayed and worked with us for one-and-a-half years and trained us in developing a Grade A and future-ready facility,” Abhijit says. He adds that there was a capability model that needed to be built in and this will be reflected in the Food Park and Food Terminal Markets, the construction of which was delayed when the pandemic broke out. 

“The first lockdown happened when we started our first project. By the time the second wave happened, we had completed our first 1 million square feet in Hosur. We are building a 3 million square feet facility at the same location. We are commissioning a second project in Hoskote in Karnataka, which is a 4 million square foot facility. 

“We are starting to build facilities in Chennai, Jaipur, Patna, Kolkata, and a few other locations across India. We hope to develop facilities over 20-21 million square feet in the next five to six years.”

Abhijit says the Indian government has initiated the creation of 37 mega food parks, which are in various stages of development. “The challenge here is that it is not only a business. You have to be driven by a larger cause. This is not only a storage system or a transport business or a market proposition. It is something in which you need to have a backward integration touching the lives of people. If you are not driven by a larger cause, you will never be able to address this problem.”  

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A grassroots perspective

Abhijit says he wanted to understand the real problems farmers were facing before initiating the project. 

“I travelled to Gulbarga in North Karnataka, which was easier for me as it has a multilingual population. This helped because I really wanted to understand their problems. Over two or three years, I visited more than 1,000 villages, living with the farmers to understand their lives and the exploitation they face.”

He gives the example of the movie Mother India, which has a manipulative money lender called Sukhilala.

“Every village in India has that kind of a character who is exploiting the situation – whether he is the moneylender or the ration shop owner. Many money lenders give loans at 10 to 12 percent per month. So for every Rs 10,000 they borrow, they pay Rs 1,000 in interest.”

Abhijit says the main thing he wants to provide farmers with is ease of doing business, be it collecting produce or connecting them with buyers or with specialists who can do a knowledge transfer on improving output.

The state-of-the-art facilities at Avigna's Food Terminal Market will include modern cold-storage facilities, a railway yard and a dry port, hospitals and budget hotels for farmers, with a plan to introduce a day pass so farmers can bring their family along.

A reason to celebrate

“I want to bring celebration in a farmer's life again. For most farmers, festivals, which largely revolve around the harvest in India, are not really a time of celebration. I want them to be able to bring their families and stay in good hotels, while meeting agriculture scientists who will help them improve their harvest, or national and international buyers who will buy their produce directly from them.”

Regarding the cost to the farmer, Abhijit says, “The cost is positive for the farmer. Instead of selling at Minimum Support Price (MSP), there is an equation where if he has more buyers, he can dictate the price. We all understand the supply-and-demand equilibrium. My role is that of an enabler. If a  farmer has no buyers, he has no option but to settle for MSP. Now there is an opportunity for growth where he can negotiate - that is the concept.” 

Abhijit says this is not just a business; it’s much larger than  that. “I will be opening up contact centres at a village level because I have a very deep rooted understanding of how things work at a grassroots level. I know how to reach the customer, what kind of network has to be built, and what kind of knowledge has to be shared. I will be building an Information Centre, which is not only an information centre but also a health centre. 

“I am giving back to society through conscious capitalism. My ultimate goal is to eradicate evil at the grassroots level for the farmer. I want to do it as a capitalist who provides them a solution, and not just a promise.”