Will agritech startup GramHeet elevate the existence of troubled ranchers?

The spouse and wife couple of Pankaj Mahalle and Shweta Thakare is utilizing a computerized stage to give coordinated present gather administrations on little ranchers.

“I don’t remember how many Diwalis my parents couldn’t keep their promise,” recalls Pankaj Mahalle. “They always tried, but couldn’t gift me new clothes,” underlines the first graduate from his family and village, Warud, in the Yavatmal district of Maharashtra, which is globally infamous for reporting the highest number of farmer suicides in India. “The moneylender would come to the house and snatch away most of the produce,” recalls Mahalle. 

“The lowest rate was the prevailing rate for the farmers,” rues Mahalle, whose family could never come out of the vicious debt cycle. “Imagine, all his life, my father produced cotton, but still couldn’t buy me a cotton shirt,” he says in a choked voice. “I have lived with their pain,” says Thakare, who graduated in electronics and telecommunication from Amravati University, and completed her Master's in development studies from IIT Hyderabad. “I wanted to work for the farmers and do my bit to improve their lives,” she says. 

Meanwhile, back in 2009, Mahalle too decided about championing the cause of the farmers. He founded ‘Kastkar’, a social organization that mobilized volunteers, worked closely with government departments, sensitized farmers about government-run schemes, and ran a mobile-based helpline for farmers in the Yavatmal district. A year later, in 2010, Thakare joined Kastkar, and the duo continued the work till 2013. 

After four years, Mahalle figured out that he needed more academic heft to make a deeper impact. Next, he joined Tata Steel Rural Development Society in Jamshedpur, married Thakare, and spent the next three years working closely with the tribals. Mahalle and Thakare decided to go back to their village. For two years, the duo kept experimenting with various social enterprise models. 

Eventually, Acumen, a social impact fund based out of New York, offered $70,000 through the Acumen Emergency Fund. “Pankaj joined the Acumen Fellows Programme in 2020 along with 20 other social innovators,” says Faheem Ahmed, senior associate (community strategy) at Acumen Academy in India. 

Acumen’s Emergency Fund, he explains, supports enterprises so that they can serve their communities' immediate needs through the pandemic and continue their long-term work of serving the poor and vulnerable after the crisis. Pankaj joined India in 2020, during an inflection point where he was building GramHeet along with Thakare. 

The duo displayed, Ahmed underlines, commitment to a ‘farmers-first’ approach along with the openness to learn from different models and approaches to tackle farmer stress. An estimated 53 percent of the 189,000 smallholder farmers in Yavatmal are in a vicious debt cycle, points out the professor at Savitri Jyotirao College of Social Work at Amravati University. 

First, there is no place to store farm produce after the harvest. And last, there is a lack of post-harvest infrastructure and allied services at the village level. GramHeet points out that Mahalle offers instant credit to farmers against the stored produce. “The freedom of choice now lies with farmers, making them the true owners of their produce,” he says. 

“So far, we have impacted close to 4,000 farmers across 91 villages in Yavatmal and Akola districts,” claims Mahalle, adding that the startup now plans to penetrate deep into Maharashtra and move into Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. “We are trying to change the identity of Yavatmal,” says Thakare.

Adding that the world has known it for the wrong reasons. “We want to be the right reason for the district and the farmers,” says Mahalle. While conceding that he is acutely aware of the challenges—building a self-sustaining social enterprise model rather than one dependent on funding is the biggest—Mahalle reckons that his team is on the right track. 

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