ISAP and Indigram Labs

Call notes from May 30

DG Attendees: Chandan, @Amrita Das (Unlicensed) @ashok @Ashu Sikri (Unlicensed)

Other attendees

• Sunil Khairnar: Advisor to Indigram Labs and ISAP

• Ram Narayan: CEO of Indigram Labs Foundation

• Gaurav Vats: Leads Ag extension at ISAP

• Krishna Mishra

Context

• ISAP has a network for 15k active agribusiness professionals and Indigram Labs is a an agritech / agribusinesses incubator that they setup.

• Seems like Sunil and Ram both knew DG in its early days and were excited to reconnect. @rikin (Unlicensed)

• We reached out to ISAP to see if we could connect FPOs with technical experts from their network to support the projects funded by our grant

• ISAP liked the idea and suggested we think more holistically as FPOs need lots of handholding beyond technical support for a specific project and a data officer. Their vision is a 15 member cross functional team, a curated and shared pool of locally plugged in professionals, at a district level (eg, accessible to multiple FPOs in a similar geography) who are on retainer and available to FPOs on-demand. Some specific roles:

  • CA: Someone who can fill out forms for the Agri-India Fund and followup with the relevant stakeholders to get the money; lots of funds available but most FPOs don’t spend 20k on a consultant who understands how to apply and drive the the process forward and get stuck

  • Secretary who ensures compliance and help FPO avoid penalties.

  • Useful to cover production, post-harvest storage, logistics but the ROI on these is harder to track so willingness to cost share is lower. accounting / finance

  • We described the farmer org level data officer role and mutually agreed that a district level Data Officer or Head of Digitization / Analytics or CTO could add a lot of value

• We talked about how to ensure the quality of professionals and felt like ratings by FPOs of the services they received was a decent mechanism to test. FPOs have funds allocated for hiring professionals and those could be channeled here

• Seems like something worth exploring. @Krishnan Pallassana (Unlicensed) and @Kunal Tiwari (Unlicensed) curious to hear your take

• Apparently ISAP has taken a version of this idea to the govt and donors like BMGF where it hasn’t really taken hold. Their sense is that govt looks at everything through the lens of specific schemes and something like this doesn’t fit their worldview.

Next Steps

• Identify a district in Jharkhand or Bihar where we can setup a district level cross-functional “special ops professionals” team that can serve as a shared resource to local FPOs

  • They don’t have a strong presence in Odisha and feel the support ecosystem in AP is already quite strong

  • Suggested focusing on oilseeds as apparently NBFCs are keen to fund FPOs for these relative to horticulture or cereals. Perishables are too hard and banks focus on producers in Kashmir or Nashik where a lot of supporting infrastructure is already in place

• Based on the needs in that district, come up with a roster of roles that would be needed. For each role, detail the expected monthly retainer, days per month available and cost per consultation, assess whether FPO would cover cost some of the cost, KPIs to track whether the professional is adding value, time it would take to get a candidate in place for that position, etc.

• This would help us come up with a budget for such a network at a district level and we can take a call on whether to pursue

• If we need technical support for the nursery, we can still pursue through ISAP, i expect the must have someone in the network with a relevant background. @Ronali Pradhan (Unlicensed)

Other

• ISAP is a Section 8 company that has 7 lakh people associated with its FB groups and whatsapp pages (full list below) and 15k active agribusiness professionals in its network

Open