Shillong, May 02: Mahesh Kanumury, founder and managing director of Arivali Partners, a venture capital firm, specializing in social enterprises benefiting the bottom of the pyramid and provides advisory and investment services to for profit social enterprises that have the potential to become $1B+ organizations and impact 1M+ lives gave an interactive insight “Social Enterprises: The next destination for entrepreneurs” at the Asian Confluence Centre on Friday evening, which was attended by a cross section of the society. This interaction is an initiative of Asian Confluence under its innovation talk series.
Mahesh’s focus areas are the rural economy and clean energy and he is already working in Meghalaya and Tripura in the region. One of the important facets of his style of working is that he closely works with entrepreneurs to help their organizations grow while impacting the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid. Some of the sectors that he has been involved with include nano-nutrients for agricultural productivity, micro-finance and livelihood promotion, agricultural lending using cooperatives, financial inclusion for the rural poor, low-cost housing, agricultural production in Africa, bio-fuel plantations in arid lands, on-demand hydrogen for remote distributed power, social venture and debt funds.
In his talk he gave several examples about innovations where the rural poor are provided with an opportunity to save their money in banks something they could never think of earlier. He said that idea is to provide banking services to interior rural villagers who are far away from regular branches through a combination of mobile technologies. Companies enable Kerana (general) shops as bank extension counter. For simple banking transactions, customers walk in the store where a finger print authenticating machine is installed and through the mobile phone the customer identity is authenticated. The Kerana shop owner types the transaction in the mobile screen and immediately the account is updated and the infra red printer prints a receipt.
Another innovation is the low-cost housing. We all know that property is immovable but that concept has changed now as a particular innovation has come with an idea to make readymade precast homes welded up to a size which are later stationed in the rural belts. One such company is already in this trade in Karnataka but the only drawback of this innovation is that once manufactured the houses cannot be altered / renovated. Kanumury said that these houses are much better than normal houses because of their better structural properties and immaculate finishing. This innovation is a noble idea which can be adopted by civic bodies and state governments to provide rural housing infrastructures to poor under government schemes.
A very unique disruptive patented innovation is nano-technology based nutrient that has shown remarkable results in the field which include significant increase of yield, reduction of pesticides and fertilizers and increase in the quality of produce. “This disruptive technique can create far reaching impact especially to small and marginal farmer and improve the quality of the soil which has been degraded with the use of excessive of chemical and fertilizer,” he said. He also said that this particular technology is disrupting conventional agricultural wisdom in a number of dimensions. “In tea plantations the recommended zinc is 8 to 12 kg per hectare whereas in nano-technology, we might require only 0.2 to 0.3 gram zinc which has shown equivalent or better results. Secondly, several ginger farmers have experimented use of nano-nutrients with and without application of fertilizers and have found higher yield when fertilizers were not utilized,” he said.
He also pointed that India has massive problem of arid lands and fuel. But there is a technology that can solve the problems is the commercial growth of Pongamia plantation. “Pongamia, hardy plants, grows in dry and arid lands, and its fruits can be crushed / refines to generate biodiesel. Then it can put into the diesel engine and the pulp can be used as bio-fertilizer and bio-pesticides. The entire process is net-carbon nutrient no net-pollution in the air,” he said adding that these plants have the ability, over 15 to 20 years time, make the soil fertile. “So the farmers’ can increase income by 5 to 10 times by planting these trees, with environment benefit, farmer benefit company benefit,” he added.
The interactive session deliberated many key issues. Mahesh opined that to implement small good idea at the micro level can be a good idea here. “Even Silicon Valley in USA, which is known today world over as the ultimate technical destination, does not have a market of its own, but what made it what it is today is because of innovation. How can Meghalaya utilize these innovations? “For Meghalaya to truly make its mark and differentiate itself, it should be test-bed for all these innovative companies. The govt. should encourage and provide a necessary coordination and infrastructure for these companies to test and market their products and services,” he said adding that on their own they won’t come because the market is limited. (SP News)
