 "Mrida Group")
Working at the grassroots and empowering the people in rural areas to build their own destiny, a social venture is making a difference in remote parts of the country
A social business venture set up four years ago by four corporates who wanted to bring the corporate vigor to rural development — that’s how Mrida was born. Since then, the four-member team now has 38 people onboard with presence in 38 villages across six different states and impacting over 20,000 people in a month. What started as a rural development project with major focus being on electrifying rural areas with solar micro-grids, Mrida eventually bifurcated its work to liaising with small and medium farmers in Uttarakhand to produce and procure healthy alternatives, and set up production unit in Gujarat to make plant extracts thereby developing a sustainable way of living.
Arun Nagpal, co-founder, Mrida Group, is upbeat when he shares Mrida’s story. “Mrida means soil and thus comes our inspiration to work at the grassroots. We started with providing energy access to people in remote areas and then, helping them learn more through this,” says Nagpal. Mrida sets up small (250 watts) solar microgrids that includes mobile charging points and LED bulbs and helps electrify about 25 houses within a kilometers range. They also set up a village development committee comprising of people from the village that carries forward the work in the community.
“Since villager save money in buying kerosene and mobile chargers, a small sum (ranging from Rs 25-50) is collected from each family monthly and a bank account is opened for that village cluster. This, village development fund, acts as a bank that lends money to the villagers while setting up any venture,” says Nagpal. While helping villagers understand the power of energy access, Mrida trains them in activities that could help them work on their own. For instance, a set of 130 women in Tehtajpur and Faridapur near Bareilly started to learn stitching in collaboration with a local NGO. Of these, 25 women went ahead with learning advanced stitching. Of which, five have now set up their own stitching venture and stitch over 7-8,000 baskets/potlis for an online e-commerce firm every month. “This way, they make about 12-15,000 per month,” says Nagpal adding how every villager is now getting an opportunity to build entrepreneurial skills. Nagpal recalls his first tryst with these women, and how they refused to speak to a male without the consent or presence of a male member of their families. “From refusing to remove their ghunghat while speaking to us, these women now do skype calls with us to discuss further course of action,” says he.
Apart from providing energy access to rural areas, Mrida has partnered with small and medium-scale farmers in Uttarakhand and helped them grow high value crops such as Millets and Amaranth. These are then used to produce healthy flours and sold via e-commerce sites, nutritionists, and also direct selling agents. “We are able to give better than market prices to the farmers and as a result, empower not just them but their wives too, who are responsible for converting the grains into flour,” he says adding that the venture has been named Earthspired for its connection with the earth and farmers.
With a processing facility in Umbergaon, Gujarat, used for producing plant extracts, Mrida has kept its business-to-business model in frame too, thereby, promoting a sustainable way of livelihood for the farmers growing those plants and also generating employment for people of those areas. Nagpal is optimistic about moving from a 58 million turnover in 2017 to about 400 million in 2021, impacting over 100,000 lives by the same time, and over a million in the next four years afterwards. Talking about expansion plans, he is hopeful of partnering with equity investors and venture capitalists to make Mrida a global company.
