How You Can Help!
News

Its All Natural: Organic Revolution of India

The New Indian Express – 9th December, 2012

By Deepshikha Punj

What could an electrical engineer, homemaker and former Test cricketer have in common? Meet 27-year-old Ashmeet Kapoor, an engineer who quit his US job to come back to India, 35-year-old Vandana Sudhakar Dutt, a homemaker from Gurgaon, and 65-year-old former India spinner Dilip Doshi for the answer: the business of organic food products. Kapoor runs I Say Organic, an online portal for organic fruits and vegetables in Delhi, Dutt lists organic stores and brands on her online portal eSvasa, and Doshi’s Organic Haus retails international organic products in India. These three very different individuals are the trailblazers of India’s coming organic age. From fruits and vegetables to breakfast cereals, beverages, cosmetics, personal healthcare products, detergents and even clothes, the demand for organic products just won’t stop growing.

A recent report of the International Competence Centre for Organic Agriculture says that 1.5 per cent of all agricultural acreage in India will be certified organic by the end of this year, by when it will have captured 2.5 per cent of the global organic market. The size of the organic food market of the country is about Rs 1,000 crore now. Ranked 33rd worldwide in terms of total land under organic cultivation and 88th in terms of agricultural land under organic crops as a proportion of total farming area, India’s organic revolution is just about germinating. The good news is that it’s less of a long way to go and more of a great place to grow. And Kapoor, Dutt and Doshi are just three of the frontiersmen cracking this market open.

There are others like Sandhya and her husband Shrikant, the owners of a 15-acre farm in Kodaikanal. Both left the beautiful hill station for the chaos of Chennai 10 years ago, setting up a shop called The Eco-Nut. Today, the store is so popular that it attracts customers from Puducherry, Pune, Bangalore, and even Mumbai. The Eco-Nut stores all kinds of natural products from pulses, dals, oils, cheese, milk, curds to Tiger Shola honey procured from Kodaikanal. Some products like flax seeds and flax seed powder, which Sandhya recommends as anti-cancer, are quite popular. The store also sells products to fight diabetes, knee pain, arthritis, low/high blood pressure and natural hair dye along with 60 varieties of organic vegetables and 20 varieties of fruits.

The time is right for young entrepreneurs to harness the power of the natural, like Abhinav Gangumulla and Santosh Banpur have. The two IIT graduates came back to Hyderabad after their degrees to find half the city’s green cover gone and the usual degenerative development at work swallowing the rest. They went organic, setting up an eco-solutions store called Hyderabad Goes Green (HGG). Set up in mid-2011, HGG’s range runs from organic pulses to handlooms and personal care products. Gangumulla and Banpur began a weekly organic vegetable market every Saturday, sourcing the produce from the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA). The organic bazaar trumps most of its competitors with its pricing. “We sell all vegetables at a flat Rs 40 per kg. This was mainly because we faced a bottleneck when it came to billing. Since some vegetables are acquired at a lower price and some higher, eventually they all average out,” says Gangumulla.

According to the Agricultural and Processed Food Products Exports Development Authority (APEDA), the cultivated land under organic certification in India is 4.43 million hectares (2010-11) making it feasible for entrepreneurs to experiment. Rajashekar Reddy Seelam, the Hyderabad-based founder of 24 Letter Mantra, an end-to-end organic food enterprise, couldn’t agree more. “These were techniques that have only been displaced in the last 20 years by chemical pesticides and fertilizers becoming available. We were able to convince farmers to at least try it out on a much smaller scale and see for themselves,” says Seelam. A former employee at a chemical fertiliser and pesticide company, Seelam’s ambitious project of seeing a country sustained by organic farming was spurred by his own awareness of the impact of chemicals on soil. When his father was diagnosed with cancer, it was the last straw; 24 Letter Mantra was born in 2004. The company now has tens of thousands of acres across the country, and stocks about 100 different products, from lentils, rice, spices, flour, oil to cooking pastes like ginger-garlic paste, tamarind paste, and even beauty products like face packs, cleansing lotions, gels and serums, organic henna, oils and soaps. Another Hyderabadi venture that turned many heads—and continues to—is Good Seeds…

Click here to read the rest of this article in its original location…