The Mushroom King of India

Posted on August 23rd, 2026

Despite Sangam Kurade’s upbringing in big cities of India, college education in the US, and the fact that he is a successful entrepreneur in agriculture — one of the toughest industries to be in this country — he is a true-blue Goan who embodies its Susegad zeitgeist. It’s a way of life that prizes sun, siesta, feni and contentment over frantic ambition.

When I land up in Goa to meet Kurade, his first order of business is to draw up a meal-by-meal itinerary for me that offers a combination of Goa’s best beaches and food.

To tailor a trip to my vegetarian diet wasn’t just a googly. “That’s a tougher challenge than running a mushroom business.” But the challenge was met, only with the pre-condition that all conversation post 5 PM take place in the company of beer.

His interest in the good life is deceptive.

Susegad Meets Science

Sangam Kurade, 64, tall, slightly hunched, wearing thick, black-framed owlish glasses, and always clad in crisp short-sleeve shirts, is the undisputed mushroom king of India.

He grows and sells 30,000kg of mushrooms every day, from the biggest supermarket chains to the neighborhood vegetable markets of the country, with sales worth Rs 200 crore annually. To build a pan-India business in a category as unforgiving as fresh food is rare enough. He has done it with a scientist’s signature on every pack, under the brand name Dr Kurade’s.

In food and agribusiness, there are several companies with revenues that top a billion dollars. There are mega food and commodity brands owned by companies such as ITC, Godrej, Hatsun Foods and Heritage in dairy or Venky’s in poultry. However, all such companies are traders and aggregators. They buy from a vast network of farmers, and open markets, and then process, package and sell them under their brand name. Only in plantation crops like coffee and tea does true vertical integration exist. The Tata Group, for instance, owns the estates and the entire value chain, right up to the shop shelf.

Similarly, Dr Kurade’s owns its farms, produces its own compost and spawn, grows and packs its mushrooms, and sells them under its own brand. Nothing in the farm-to-plate chain is farmed out. And, building a brand and supply chain in a fresh, perishable category is tougher still. You cannot warehouse mushrooms like tea, coffee or grains.

“Nobody in India grows mushrooms anywhere near our scale of 30 tons a day. There are some who do 4-5 tons. For them mushrooms are just one part of a diverse portfolio. As a food scientist and technologist, this is my sole focus. My team lives and breathes mushrooms,” says Sangam Kurade.

That single-mindedness, it turns out, runs in the family.

The Legacy of Determination

His grandfather Gopinath and father Anand were both freedom fighters during the Portuguese rule of Goa. In one underground campaign, a teenaged Anand Kurade was captured and forced to say “Bon Portugal.” When he kept chanting “Jai Hind” instead, he had his teeth hacked by a bayonet. The Kurade family was blacklisted in Goa.

In the days of exile, Anand Kurade got a degree from Pune’s renowned College of Agriculture. He got a PhD in food science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. At Amherst, his roommates were Bansi Lal Amla and Hormusji Parpia, who both went on to head the Central Food Technological Research Institute in Mysuru. Anand Kurade himself had become a legendary food technologist in India who helped private sector firms set up food processing plants. When Goa was liberated in 1961, people carried him on their shoulders and gave him a hero’s welcome.

Sangam Kurade followed in his father’s footsteps and got a master’s degree in food technology from the University of Hawaii and a PhD in food science from the University of Tennessee. After returning to India a decade later, he joined his father’s flourishing consulting practice based in Delhi, helping Indian companies get into canned and preserved foods.

By the early 1990s Sangam Kurade was keen to come back to his roots in Goa.

An Accidental Entrepreneur

“I wanted to use my expertise and build something around intensive, high-value agriculture. Conventional farming was never an option. The landholding in Goa was much smaller than states like Maharashtra. To make it a viable business I needed at least 50 acres.”

Aquaculture was attractive, given his master’s degree in seafood, but he would have to rely on waterbodies he couldn’t own. Floriculture was an emerging opportunity, but the market for flowers was seasonal. By a process of elimination, Kurade settled on mushrooms.

“At the time I was doing a study on mushrooms for my father. I had some data with me. It seemed a good choice because it could be cultivated indoors round the year without the impact of weather. It’s a food that could have a national play, and nobody was doing it at scale anyway,” recalls Kurade.

In 1993, he drew up a project report and walked into the general manager’s office at ICICI in Mumbai’s Ballard Estate. Unimpressed by the idea of growing fungus that no one in India ate or was likely to, Kurade was shooed away in short order. As he was walking out, a burly American pulled him into his own room and asked to see the file. Harry Martin represented USAID, the American government’s development agency, which in partnership with ICICI was looking to fund young Indians in sustainable food and agriculture. “Martin grabbed me by the arm to the GM’s room and said, this is exactly the kind of business we are in the business of funding.” The consultant became an entrepreneur, almost by accident, with a soft loan of Rs 1 crore.

The decade Kurade spent studying in the US certainly played a part in sealing the deal with USAID. Securing a loan was the easiest part of starting up. “Forget selling mushrooms when you don’t have the foggiest idea of how to grow them. I created five bare growing rooms with basic refrigeration on a piece of ancestral land in Canacona where my grandfather grew coconuts. I had to learn how to grow mushrooms by trial and error, and then train others,” he says. While the proposal on paper had a target of growing 500kg a day, over two years Kurade had learned to grow a paltry 50kg.

Even as Kurade came to grips with production, there was the matter of finding a market. The chefs in touristy Goa hotels knew how to use mushrooms, the households had little idea.

“I would take two kilos of fresh mushrooms every day to Mapusa, the biggest fresh food wholesale market in Goa, plead with traders to buy it, and take back a kilo of unsold mushrooms back the next day,” Kurade says.

Mapusa Market Lessons

By eight in the morning, the chaos at Mapusa market subsides considerably, but vegetable rot in the light rain helps maintain the mess. Irfan Khatib’s family has been trading here in fresh produce, especially exotic fruits and vegetables for more than 50 years. He is the first vendor Kurade took his mushrooms to in the early days.

“I still can’t forget the day when he walked into my shop wearing crisp white kurta pyjamas, carrying a basket of mushrooms, and said I want to start selling here. I was skeptical because the fresh food business is dangerous and unpredictable. Those days the market for mushrooms in all of Goa was just about 50kg,” says Khatib, a short, stocky man with a bald pate and speech that knows no punctuation.

Kurade learned the ropes of supply chain and consumer behavior from traders like Khatib. He started selling mushrooms in 200g packets that households could buy for one meal use.

“I used to stand right here and tell buyers what a mushroom was, how to cook it, its nutritional qualities and health benefits. It was a fervent plea I had to make every day,” says Kurade.

The mushrooms were branded White Pearls, with a frog on a mushroom head as the logo. “Goa is a small place where everyone knows one another. People were anyway referring to my produce as Dr Kurade’s mushrooms. Since the word of mouth was so strong, they asked shopkeepers for Kuradye chi mushroom rather than White Pearls. That’s how the brand was born.”

“I really appreciate what he has done for Goa and Goans. Whenever I go to Bengaluru and see every shop selling Dr Kurade’s mushrooms, I feel immensely proud. It’s like how people in a shop ask for Bisleri water or Kingfisher beer, today if it is mushrooms it is Dr Kurade’s,” Khatib says.

To understand the unique nature of large-scale mushroom farming, we need to understand their biology.

The Third Kingdom

Mushrooms are fungi. Just as plants and animals have their own kingdom, so do fungi, a kingdom of their own. If you are a believer, they are the closest thing to God: omnipresent, from the deepest seafloors to deserts to polar permafrost, but invisible until they choose to fruit. Like Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in Hindu cosmology, they birth, nourish and decompose life on earth. And they have been at it for a billion years.

“They are eating rock, making soil, digesting pollutants, nourishing and killing plants, surviving in space, inducing visions, producing food, making medicines, manipulating animal behavior, and influencing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere. Fungi provide a key to understanding the planet on which we live, and the ways that we think, feel, and behave. Yet they live their lives largely hidden from view, and over ninety percent of their species remain undocumented. The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them,” wrote biologist Merlin Sheldrake in his seminal 2020 book Entangled Life on the third kingdom.

The mushroom is simply the fruit of this invisible kingdom. What we eat is just the tip of something vast and ancient.

For centuries, farming mushrooms was more like dark magic than agriculture. While Chinese growers figured out how to raise shiitake mushrooms on fallen tree logs some 800 years ago, Western commercial mushroom farming really took off in the 1600s in France, where melon growers found white button mushrooms or Agaricus bisporus, the most widely grown variety today, popping up in warm piles of horse manure. To get the dark, damp, cool conditions mushrooms need to fruit, 19th-century French farmers moved operations underground into the vast limestone catacombs beneath Paris, creating the world’s first indoor farm industry.

The real revolution came in the 20th century, when scientists replaced wild, dirty spores with sterile, laboratory-grown “grain spawn,” wheat kernels coated in pure fungal culture, and synthetic compost so that growers no longer relied on horse manure. By the 1980s, Dutch engineers had automated the process further still, with computerized climate control systems and aluminum growing racks that could be fine-tuned by the hour. Today, large-scale mushroom farming has evolved into “agrifacture,” a high-tech, multi-billion-dollar global industry where thousands of tons of mushrooms are grown every day inside giant chambers with precision-controlled atmosphere completely independent of the weather outside.

“Each mushroom is a bundle of nutrition. Every 100g of mushroom contains 3g of protein, one of the highest in a non-animal, fresh food source — as much as in spinach or broccoli. They are naturally low in calories, fat, and sodium, but packed with immunity-boosting vitamin D, B-complex, essential minerals like selenium and potassium, which are good for the heart and blood pressure. Not to mention antioxidants, and special fibers called beta-glucans that feed your gut’s healthy bacteria,” explains Kurade.

Dr Kurade’s mushrooms retail for about Rs 250 a kilo, a shade above the cheaper, unbranded stuff on offer elsewhere. Even so, it remains an affordable source of nutrition. But India’s dietary dilemma over whether mushrooms are vegetarian, still persistent in several communities, has limited their everyday adoption. “Let me put it this way, yes it’s neither a plant nor animal, but grows and sets root in completely organic, chemical-free compost like any other vegetable. So it’s completely vegetarian. In fact Covid-19 was a great inflection point for mushroom sales in India when everyone was looking for immunity-boosting food,” says Kurade.

Agrifacture at Scale

Like any crop, good soil is fundamental to growing good mushrooms. But mushrooms don’t need soil. They require moist compost teeming with microbial life.

Dr Kurade’s state-of-the-art factory in central Goa’s Usgaon includes a centralized compost yard. In steamy Goa of mid-June, where each second outdoors compounds the sweaty disarray, the compost yard that smells of septic tank is knockout-by-nausea territory.

Here, nitrogen-rich chicken manure is mixed with decomposed paddy straw, sugarcane fiber, and oil cakes, and sterilized for 21 days. When this mushroom soil is loose and smells no different from the earth, it is inoculated with spawn and packed into 10kg plastic bags.

Each bag is a piece of land that yields 3kg of mushrooms. Dr Kurade’s plant fills 10,000 such bags every single day.

These bags are then locked away in growing rooms. Each growing room is the size of two tennis courts. 6,500 grow bags are stacked from ceiling to floor on galvanized steel racks resembling an IKEA warehouse. The temperature is controlled. The moisture is controlled. The air is controlled. The compost bags are watered automatically. Nothing here is left to chance or season or weather. They smell like a sterilized hospital ward. This is not a farm. This is agropolis. A veritable city of mushrooms where agriculture meets the precision of a factory and the patience of a laboratory.

The bags start producing harvestable mushrooms after 20 days; each bag produces 3kg of mushrooms over 21 days. The mushroom and its thread-like mycelial network that grows through the compost are so delicate that they have to be picked with soft hands. Not uprooted vertically but gently like unscrewing a water bottle. Which is why women are usually employed for the harvesting process.

Inside the Agropolis

And this agropolis never sleeps. The harvesting happens 24/7 every single day of the year. This finicky fungus is forever in a race against time.

“We don’t even stop work for Ganesh Chaturthi, the biggest festival here. That’s the nature of mushrooms. They have a shelf life of two days at room temperature. They are dainty like flowers. To ensure that mushrooms reach Mumbai to Trivandrum, at the southern tip of India, which takes 10 to 17 hours by road, we need to harvest fresh, pack fresh, be gentle and yet move fast. Refrigerated trucks don’t make economic sense. So we use innovative ice-gel packs to keep them fresh,” explains Kurade.

India’s mushroom market is estimated to be barely more than Rs 3,000 crore. Per capita consumption is less than 100g a year. But it has been growing at 15% annually.

In a fragmented market dominated by small local growers, there are perhaps half a dozen organized players, each producing 4 to 5 tons a day. With a daily output greater than all of them combined, he is in a category of one.

But there are breakneck expansion plans in place: to double capacity in two years and hit 100 tons a day in five, and eventually reach the scale of Chinese firms that set the benchmark for mushroom production and innovation. China dominates the world’s mushroom industry, accounting for about 95% of global production.

“Here is a first-generation entrepreneur getting into food tech and building a consumer brand not just in Goa but nationally. He has built it to Bharat-scale. He has done it with consistency, quality of his products and his network of retailers and dealers, without ads or an iota of publicity. His is truly an inspiring story. He also generates a large amount of rural livelihood. I really admire him on all those counts,” says Rajkumar Kamath, chairman of Vibrant Goa Foundation, an organization that promotes entrepreneurship, and a successful cleantech businessman himself. In fact, Kurade is so self-effacing that he dodged an award from the foundation for several years, finally accepting it only this year.

But building a successful business in an unlikely category from scratch is just a small part of the Sangam Kurade story. Life forced him to run the same marathon twice over.

When the River Rose

Dr Kurade’s first plant in Canacona’s Bhatpal village is one of the oldest functioning mushroom plant in the country. Its location is stunning even by Goa’s standards of gorgeous landscapes. It is enclosed by malachite-green hills, coconut and jackfruit groves and evergreen trees. The Talpona river makes a sharp bend around its boundary. At this time of the year it should have been gurgling. Instead, the flow can’t even fully cover its rocky bed, making the river look like a famished, bony beast.

The Talpona is a tame, tiny river, only some 30km long. It joins the sea to the west, not very far from here. But on October 2, 2009, it rose up in rage. It swept away everything in its wake. Including the business Sangam Kurade had built over 15 years. In one single day.

“My husband was in the UK on work. My son’s friends had come home because it was a holiday for Gandhi Jayanti. I was cooking and looking after the kids when someone from the factory called. He said the water from the river had risen. I told him a sluice gate might have been opened somewhere and asked him to call the fire brigade as a precaution. He said, ‘But madam, the water is above the factory roof and chairs are stuck in coconut trees.’ I knew it was something serious but couldn’t even imagine the scene. I had only seen footage of floods on TV from places like Uttarakhand,” says Tosha Kurade, Sangam Kurade’s wife and a medical doctor who specializes in industrial and occupational health.

Before Sangam Kurade could land in Goa the next day, Tosha managed to get to the factory 80km from their home in Panaji. Recalling the devastation she witnessed then makes her tear up even today.

“Nothing called a factory was remaining. I could see all the mushroom racks and equipment lying on the public roads far away from the site. All of it was my husband’s hard work. I was with him when he came back because I knew what he would feel. I had always told him he was actually married to mushrooms. He would talk about mushrooms or something related to it all the time. He was so passionate. He broke down. And that I couldn’t take. It made me strong that he broke down.”

Tosha summoned up all her personal savings from a successful career and informed Dr Kurade’s bankers that she’d pay up for all outstanding loans to the last rupee.

It was a Rubicon moment for the Kurades and the business. The floods came at a moment when the business was finally beginning to boom. Folding up or finding another job wasn’t an option for the adventurous and go-getting couple.

“Even today I have a successful practice. If he fails, I’m always there. If he succeeds, I’ll push him further.”

The Kurades resolved that the business should be back on its feet in three months. And it was.

“In 2009, here I had 12 growing rooms, making about one ton per day, coasting merrily with my production. Everything was stable. Suddenly I lost everything. But I wanted to rebuild everything bigger and better,” says Sangam Kurade.

In three months, not only had mushrooms started sprouting again in the plant, the Kurades had put in place a plan to make the business even bigger with a new plant. This time on higher ground and not in the vicinity of the sea or river.

“I remember what happened in 2009. My dad wasn’t in the country and my mum got the phone call. I was playing with my friends from school. I knew something was wrong. When dad came back, he vowed to everybody around that in three months we’d be back up and running, at the cost of his own emotional turmoil, I’m sure. The way he has raised this business is through sheer force, sheer determination. He has bent almost God’s will and brought it back from where it was,” says Anuj Kurade, Head, New Business, Dr Kurade’s, now 28.

Rebuilding Bigger

Even before the floods of 2009, Sangam Kurade knew he had to expand production beyond the six acres of Canacona. The catastrophe, in a way, forced his hand. This was an opportunity to reboot at a bigger scale, with complete vertical integration, from soil to aisle, and even turn the spent mushroom compost into valuable organic fertilizer for other farmers, instead of simply rebuilding the old plant. The bigger plant in Usgaon was up and running by 2014.

But it was Covid-19 that created the runway for liftoff. During the lockdowns, Dr Kurade’s could continue operating as a company selling an essential food commodity. It discovered the power of e-commerce. The new channel was particularly suited to a highly perishable product like mushrooms. Younger urban consumers were already looking for healthier vegetables that were easy to cook.

“Now we are building to scale. Even as I talk to you sitting here, I’m thinking about 2032. By 2027 we should be achieving our ambition to take this company forward. But beyond that, there are other aspects of mushroom cultivation, different types of mushroom, the back end and the forward end, seed cultivation, seed multiplication, manufacturing the soil, manufacturing exotic and new kinds of mushroom. That is bound to take shape between 2027 and 2030. So, as things stand, we have the second generation ready to take over, and the younger generation today has better ideas,” Kurade says.

The ambition and innovation notwithstanding, Kurade’s approach to business is conservative if not old-world. He has always relied on bank loans and plowed profits back into expansions, instead of raising money from investors in exchange for equity. That’s probably a reason why he has never advertised. His factories have no large signboards. Even the corporate HQ in Patto, Panaji’s central business district, is hard to locate in the absence of prominent branding.

The Next Generation

For most of Sangam Kurade’s life as an entrepreneur, everything centered around survival. Now as his son Anuj Kurade takes up a bigger role, the priorities are growth and expansion.

“At an Indian wedding buffet, you’ll now most certainly find a mushroom dish alongside the customary potato and paneer. That shows it has penetrated into the Indian diet. But the real fun will begin when people in tier-3 and 4 cities take to it. That’s what we are now building towards. We want to be the house of mushrooms, looking at every aspect of it rather than just as food,” says Anuj Kurade.

Beyond mushrooms as a food, Dr Kurade’s is looking to tap the potential of mushrooms in health and wellness too. This year, Anuj’s team launched a mushroom-based cosmetics and skincare brand called Kinoko Labs.

At 64, Sangam Kurade’s passion for mushrooms is undiminished. Like all Goans, he loves the good life, but has managed to blend ambition and perseverance with Susegad. He says he’s just getting ready for the real mushroom boom: new plants across the country, export markets, mushroom-based health and wellness products, and beating the Chinese at their own game of scale and innovation. The mushroom king of India wants to build a global empire from tiny, take-it-easy Goa.

“It is the story of persistence, resolve, never-give-up entrepreneurship. And I am sure many have gone through it, survived and become big. I’m just one of them. The story of Dr Kurade’s according to me is only halfway there; another 2x-3x is still waiting to happen. Let the mushroom sprout.”

Garbage to gas: The Duo Powering Indian Kitchens with Food Waste

Posted on June 4th, 2026

India’s definitive love language is food. From sprawling, extravagant weddings to massive community feasts, we express care through feeding. But this cultural generosity comes with a staggeringly heavy subtext: waste.

Every year, India squanders ₹92,000 crores worth of food—enough to feed the entire population of Bihar. Instead of nourishing people, the vast majority of this surplus ends up rotting in open landfills, off-gassing methane into the atmosphere.

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For Sandeep Karajanagi and Disha Ahuja, founders of Ahuja Engineering Services, a visit to one such landfill altered the trajectory of their careers.

“It was an epiphany moment,” says Karajanagi. “We looked at it and realized: this is what we are leaving our children—a world choked by untreated waste.”

In 2017, both scientists returned to India after high-velocity careers in the United States, where Karajanagi had completed a postdoc at MIT and served as a professor at Harvard Medical School. Rather than retreating into the clean comfort of biomedical research, they chose to pivot toward a much messier, more urgent crisis.

The On-Site, Closed-Loop Solution

The duo’s breakthrough wasn’t just inventing a treatment method, but rethinking the logistics of waste management. Their strategy bypasses the municipal system entirely by treating food waste exactly where it is generated.

“We install a biogas plant directly on the client’s premises, convert the organic waste into gas, and pipe it right back into the kitchen that produced it,” Karajanagi explains. It is a textbook closed loop: no garbage trucks hauling filth across the city, no secondary pollution, and no transport costs.

Ahuja Engineering Services targets bulk waste generators—commercial kitchens, university campuses, hospital canteens, IT parks, and massive market yards—that produce at least 200 kg of organic waste daily.

Their proof-of-concept came through a partnership with the Akshaya Patra Foundation, the giant NGO managing mid-day meal kitchens for school children across India. Over a decade later, the company runs operational plants at 13 different Akshaya Patra locations.

“That longevity really validates our technology,” says Ahuja. The high-calorie food waste from these mega-kitchens goes into the digester; clean biogas is piped straight back into the cooking burners, and the nutrient-dense leftover slurry goes into the institutional gardens as bio-fertilizer.

The corporate and institutional worlds soon took notice. Today, the company’s client roster includes Capgemini, Mahindra University, various CSIR institutes, a major vegetable market in Hyderabad, and even an iconic temple. Collectively, their 36 operational plants span Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Delhi-NCR, Odisha, and Sikkim, diverting over 42 tonnes of food waste from landfills every single day.

Insulated from the Grid

The timing of their expansion has proven remarkably prescient. As India navigates erratic LPG supply strains and price volatility in 2026, clients who invested in on-site biogas are completely insulated from the disruption.

“They are reaping the compounding benefits of having independent, renewable energy on-site,” says Karajanagi. “It is helping them effortlessly tide over the current energy crisis.”

Crucially, the company has solved the fatal flaw of historical Indian biogas projects: maintenance. Across the country, thousands of rural and urban digesters lie abandoned due to a lack of technical support. Ahuja Engineering built daily WhatsApp troubleshooting and video-call engineering support directly into their service model, acknowledging that the ground-level staff operating the machinery are kitchen workers, not engineers.

The frontier ahead remains massive. Hyderabad alone generates between 4,000 to 5,000 tonnes of biodegradable waste every single day. The technology is proven, the economics are airtight, and the fuel is sitting in our bins. Now, as Karajanagi notes, the public awareness just needs to catch up to the science.

Watch: The millionaire grape farmers of Nashik

Posted on February 1st, 2026

How did a group of debt-ridden small farmers from Nashik, Maharashtra, turn their failing grape crops into a ₹2,000 crore export empire that supplies supermarkets across Europe? This is the incredible yet true story of Sahyadri Farms – India’s largest fruit & vegetable farmer-owned company, often called “The Amul of Grapes.” In the mid of 2000s, hundreds of Nashik farmers were gripped by losses. Instead of giving up, 700 farmers (now over 21,000) pooled their land, dreams, and courage to form a company that they themselves own and run. Today, Sahyadri Farms is a fully integrated giant – from ultra-modern packhouses and cold chains to its own R&D labs– all 100% owned by the farmers. In this documentary you’ll discover:

• How they cracked the tough European retail markets
• The emotional journey from almost giving up to exporting ₹2,000 crore
• How every farmer went from earning about ₹100,000 a year to becoming a shareholder in a horticulture giant
• The collective model that’s inspiring a new agricultural revolution in India

This is more than a success story. It’s proof that when Indian farmers unite, they don’t just survive – they can dominate the world.

Odisha’s rice that can beat diabetes and malnutrition

Posted on February 1st, 2026

In mid-November, as the monsoon has fully retreated, Odisha’s dry season begins, stretching nearly six months until the onset of the southwest monsoon. On the 70-kilometre drive from Titlagarh, where summer temperatures can cross 50 degrees Celsius, to Bolangir, the terrain is a mix of gently rolling plains, undulations and isolated hills; there are barely any potholes. The riverbeds lie dry, overrun by vast stretches of kans grass. In full bloom, its flowers resemble white ostrich feathers swaying in loose unison.

And yet, the canals that criss-cross the region continue to course with water. Village ponds brim and sparkle with waterlilies. The land itself glows with the green of vegetable patches and the gold of a bumper rice crop ready for harvest. For those of us old enough to remember the headlines of the late 1990s, this scene is nothing short of a miracle. This is the infamous KBK region—abbreviation for Koraput-Bolangir-Kalahandi—three districts stacked like Jenga blocks in western Odisha, with Bolangir in the north and Koraput at the bottom bordering Andhra Pradesh.

Just two decades ago KBK was shorthand for darkness and deprivation. With nearly 90% of the population living below the poverty line, the region drew international attention for chronic hunger, migration, and some of India’s worst human development indicators. It was the symbol of India’s failure.

But things have changed dramatically. New roads slice through areas that were once inaccessible. Massive irrigation schemes have turned this former dustbowl into a rice bowl.

Since 2004, rice production in KBK has more than doubled to 1.7 million tons a year–more than 10% of Odisha’s overall impressive leap to 12 million tons. Other crops such as vegetables and pulses have prospered too. Hunger, in the caloric sense, is no longer the primary challenge here. The battle against empty stomachs may have been won, but the war for nutrition isn’t.

It’s not just the story of KBK but India at large. Despite becoming the top rice producer in the world and running the largest free and subsidized food programme in the world that covers 800 million people, India’s health and nutrition statistics make for sorry reading. The most recent National Family Health Survey shows that more than a third of Indian children under five are stunted. Nearly one in five are ‘wasted’ (acute malnutrition where a child is too thin for their height– a sign of failure to gain weight adequately). Anaemia affects women and children at alarming levels and is now visible among a quarter of adult men. Alongside this undernutrition sits a growing burden of non-communicable diseases. Over 15% Indian men and 13% women have high blood sugar or are on diabetes medication.

“This coexistence of undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and rising non-communicable diseases reflects a triple burden. Much of this is linked to low dietary diversity and heavy reliance on refined staples, especially rice based diets,” says Swati Nayak, the South Asia Lead for seed systems at the International Rice Research Institute and the winner of the 2023 Norman Borlaug Field Award given to young scientists for outstanding contributions in food and nutrition security.

Rice is the single most important food crop in the world. It is the staple food for half the world’s population—from Jamaica to Japan and the Middle East to Malaysia. In India, the socio-economic and cultural importance of rice cannot be overstated. India has recently become the world’s largest producer of rice at 150 million tons overtaking China, and it accounts for nearly half of the world’s rice trade. Major festivals such as Sankranti are linked to harvest. Replacing it on our plates is simply unthinkable.

But a modern life that involves less physical labor has turned our beloved grain into a chief culprit for lifestyle diseases.

A rice dominant-diet can cause rapid spikes in blood sugar, which increases the risk of diabetes and weight gain. It also fills the stomach without providing enough essential protein or vitamins, leaving you well-fed calorically but starving nutritionally.

In a state like Odisha, still among the poorest in the country, where access to vegetables and protein remains a challenge, a completely rice-reliant diet poses serious public health risks.

So policymakers and scientists in Odisha are asking a different question. Instead of changing diets, can the staple itself be made healthier?

The Odisha government has partnered with the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) to launch what it calls the world’s first Speciality Rice Programme.

The premise is pretty straightforward. Improve the nutritional quality of rice itself, without altering how people cook or eat it.

The programme focuses on scaling new rice varieties developed by scientists that are naturally biofortified. These include rice that is higher in protein, richer in micronutrients such as zinc, or lower in glycaemic index. Crucially, these varieties are designed to look, cook, and taste like the rice people already eat.

“The speciality rice programme focuses on deploying or mainstreaming and scaling the healthier rice varieties to enhance consumer nutrition as well as farmers’ income. As a pilot, we have chosen four districts where malnutrition is a big problem,” says Arabinda Padhee, Secretary, Agriculture and Farmers Empowerment, Odisha and one of the most powerful bureaucrats in the state. Perhaps, being the chief administrator of the Jagannath Temple in Puri provides a more accurate measure of his power in a state where the standard greeting from cities to villages is ‘Jai Jagannath’.

Padhee himself has a PhD in agri sciences and is a proud ambassador of Odia culture, always attired in colourful Sambalpuri ikat jackets. Krushi Bhawan, the agri department’s HQ where Padhee works out of, is one of the most striking buildings in Bhubaneshwar. Built in 2020, the four-story building is designed around a lush central courtyard with ponds and trees. Its standout feature is the intricate brick façade patterned like traditional Sambalpuri ikat handloom textiles with geometric motifs in earthy tones. It’s meant to make citizens feel welcome rather than to intimidate (if they can get past the cordons of security, that is).

Under the Speciality Rice Project in its third year, the Odisha government has managed to convert some 15,000 farmers to start growing the new biofortified varieties of rice on 15,000 hectares.

“The programme’s role includes varietal research and breeding, nutritional profiling, agronomic testing, and connecting academic discoveries with farmers and markets. The goal is to ensure that these innovations reach the fields and the plates and kitchens of consumers. Through a global network and local partnerships, the programme aims to be scalable, sustainable, and aligned with both health and livelihood goals,” explains IRRI’s Nayak.

To begin with, scientists at IRRI in collaboration with government research organizations such as the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) develop and test the new varieties. Once approved, the Odisha government and IRRI create ‘rice cafeterias’. The cafeterias are simply vast demonstration fields of the 20-odd new biofortified varieties they’ve chosen to popularize. The farmers can visit the cafeterias to evaluate them first hand on a host of parameters such as yield potential, disease resistance, tolerance to adverse climate and grain quality. When farmers choose a certain variety, the state government provides them with seeds for free. IRRI also conducts monthly village camps to evangelize the new varieties with cooking and tasting quality demonstrations of the biofortified varieties followed by a communal feast for the farmers.

But it is in the labs that heavy lifting happens. Biofortification is often misunderstood as genetic modification. It is not. In a sense, humans have been genetically modifying plants and animals to make them yield more or better through techniques like grafting and selective breeding since agriculture began. Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) today involves altering the genes of a plant in a lab. For instance, genetically modified ‘Golden Rice’ was created by adding to the rice genome a gene from the daffodil plant–an unrelated species–to increase beta-carotene levels 20-fold in rice.

“Biofortification means genetically improving food crops like rice for nutritional traits like higher zinc, iron or protein. With polished and milled rice we eat, micronutrients are lost. Biofortification helps to retain the nutrients,” says Krishnendu Chattopadhyay, principal scientist, Central Rice Research Institute (CRRI), Cuttack.

CRRI is one of the oldest and top rice breeding centres in India that began work on biofortification of rice in 2009. Clad in a yellow short-sleeve shirt, jeans and white sneakers, with professorial black-framed glasses, Chattopadhyay, 56, scarcely looks the man who was instrumental in creating one of the world’s first biofortified rice varieties. He speaks in soft, measured tones—the voice of a scientist who has spent decades perfecting CRR Dhan 310, a rice variety with a protein content of 10-11% compared to the usual 6%.

To create new biofortified varieties breeders like Chattopadhyay first identify rice that could be a wild race or one that is little known but with the desired nutrients like protein or zinc. It is like picking up a book from a library of crops where each one is preserved and its traits catalogued. Bigger the library, greater the chances of success. International research organisations like IRRI have the ability to create mega libraries with access to seeds from across the world.

In the case of CRR 310, Chattopadhyay and his team found a variety called ARC 10075 from Assam with high protein content but very low yielding. They then crossed it with popular high-yielding varieties like Naveen and Swarna. Scientists then spend 7-10 years selecting offspring plants that combine both traits while testing them across multiple growing seasons and locations. The most promising candidates underwent rigorous field trials and nutritional analysis before being released to farmers. The entire process requires patience and precision to ensure the new variety was both nutritious and viable for farmers to grow at scale.

Currently the subsidized rice supplied by the government through ration shops is externally fortified. Vitamins and minerals like iron, B12 and folic acid are mixed with rice flour and kernels that look like rice are created. One kilogram of these kernels is added to 100 kg of rice. This method has some problems, it is expensive and the bioavailability of minerals to the human body can be low. Plus it is found that many consumers pick out the fortified kernels that look slightly different from rice, thinking it is contamination. External fortification treats food like a delivery vehicle for pills. Biofortification turns the farm itself into the first line of public health protection—at low-cost, and at scale.

But scaling innovation is often harder than creating it. In Odisha, adoption depends on reliable seed supply, farmer confidence, and market demand.

The new rice varieties are already a big hit among farmers.

Jogeswar Sa, 49, is a short but sturdy farmer with a lush head of black hair, dressed in a black and canary yellow dhoti and matching shirt with large Sambalpuri patterns. He was impressed by a zinc-rich speciality rice variety called BRRI 69 at one of the demonstration plots. The panicle–the branching cluster at the top where rice grains hang like an upside-down Christmas tree–was longer, indicating higher yield, and the grain itself heavier. He switched to the new rice on his two-acre farm. “I get 5-6 quintals per acre more. The rice itself is perfect for pakhala bhat [cooked rice soaked overnight for light fermentation; hugely popular in Odisha] and fish and mutton curry,” beams Sa.

The demand among farmers is such that seeds are at a premium. Since these are new varieties, neither the research organisations nor government institutions such as the state seed corporation have the stock to keep pace.

IRRI and the Odisha government encourage farmers who are part of the programme to make seeds from a small part of their output. Seed production is specialized. An acre of rice needs 15-20 kg of seeds. Farmers need to select plants in a vast field that produce the most and healthiest grains; harvest and thresh them separately; store and process them with care so that they have the best chance of yielding in the next season. 

“We have adopted a seed-to-market value chain approach in this entire project. Crucially, we are involving women farmers and self-help groups wherever possible. We want them to become the champions in every part of the project from raising the crop, aggregating the produce, seed production and marketing,” adds Padhee. 

Binapani Mangal, 36, is a two-acre farmer in a village called Akhuapada on the shores of Baitarni, a large flood-prone river in Bhadrak district, 100km to the north east of Bhubaneshwar. The landscape in the coastal plains only gets a denser green and the tree canopies are broader than in Bolangir. Mangal is a woman with strong, broad shoulders and high cheek bones who zips around in a scooter. She has been growing a speciality rice variety called BRRI 84 for two years on half her holding. It is a zinc-rich variety with long slender grains and a red tint. Since red rice is common in these parts, the BRRI 84 fits easily into the diet. “Since the rice boosts immunity power, we are not only able to sell it for a higher price but also get five quintals more per acre,” she says. 

Despite the growing irrigation network, more than 40% of farmers in the Bolangir region depend on rainfall.  The region is also susceptible to drought. Another key reason for the popularity of speciality rice varieties is their hardiness. “While our farmers are increasing seed production every season, the demand is such that we run out of stock in no time,” says Motilal Misra, chairman of the Puintala Farmer Producer Company (FPC) in Bolangir district. A farmer producer company or FPC is a social enterprise that’s a hybrid between a cooperative, such as Amul, and a private limited company. An FPC can be formed when ten or more farmers in a region band together. But it has to be owned and managed by its member-farmers. Many members of the PFC are women who make value-added products such as poha, rice flour and crackers under its own brand. “If regular poha sells for Rs 50/kg, ours costs more than double. But we can’t match the demand for sugar-free rice products,” adds Misra. 

Odisha’s speciality rice initiative offers a different model for addressing malnutrition. It does not rely on supplements, behavioural change campaigns, or imported health foods.

Instead, it works at the level of the seed. For populations that eat rice every day, this approach offers better nutrition without disruption. For farmers, it provides higher incomes and resilience. For policymakers across the Global South, it presents a replicable model that works within existing food systems.

It is not a dramatic transformation of diets. It is a subtle shift in what grows in the field. And for a country where rice remains central to life, that may be the most practical place to begin.

This Maharashtra firm is bringing native seeds back

Posted on November 28th, 2025

Trekking through the hills of Shyadari in Maharashtra, besides the stunning views, Shailesh Awate, the co-founder of OOO Farms, always looked forward to enjoying the local food. 

For over a decade, Shailesh noticed a change in the grains served to him. “The food tasted different and it got me intrigued,” he says. Investigating, he found that tribal farmers in the regions had switched from growing native or traditional seeds to hybrid seeds.

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“I understood the difference and the catastrophe of losing our native varieties. That’s when we began our search for them.” says Shailesh. 

This loss felt more personal to Shailesh and he decided to go on a mission to save native seeds. He planted the seeds of OOO Farms with his co-founder Shikha Kansagara almost a decade ago and has saved 4357 native varieties of rice, 747 varieties of maize, 465 varieties of Wheat, and a lot more. 

What are native seeds?

Native seeds are seeds from plants that have naturally evolved and adapted over thousands of years to a specific region’s soil, climate, and ecosystem without human interference or genetic modification.

They are essentially the original, naturally occurring varieties of crops unlike modern hybrid or genetically modified seeds, which are bred in labs for higher yield or specific traits.

A testament to ancient eating habits, losing native seeds means losing nutrition. “Take rice, for example, some are flood-tolerant, drought-tolerant, pest-resistant, and even adaptable to changing climates. You don’t find that kind of resilience in hybrid varieties; they may claim to offer it, but from my own experience, that’s rarely the case,” explains Shailesh. 

These crops are also regenerative in nature. “When you buy 1 kg of seeds and sow them, you get a good harvest but the problem is, you can’t use that produce as seed for the next season. You have to go back to the market and buy seeds again. These seeds aren’t regenerative.”

When farmers lose native seeds, they also spend more on repurchasing hybrid seeds every season increasing their cost. 

Going back to the roots

Shikha and Sailesh have worked together for years and have collaborated with thousands of farms to help them switch back to native seeds. 

“Convincing the farmers, especially in Gujarat, was not easy. They’ve been growing a certain variety and getting a certain price for it, even though it’s nowhere close to the minimum selling price, some farmers in South Gujarat got as little as ₹5 per kg for the rice they sell to traders,” says Shikha. 

So, the first thing the duo did was to establish a board of farmers who could decide their own price. They started distributing native seeds free of cost.

“When they realized the seeds were free, their first hesitation disappeared. Then we encouraged them to start small, to grow these varieties on a small patch of land instead of their entire field. That way, even if something went wrong, they wouldn’t feel like they’d lost everything. That’s how the shift slowly began,” Shikha recounts. 

OOO Farms also established three seed banks to preserve thousands of varieties of native seeds.

“Most of these seeds are found with the poorest farmers, the ones who can’t afford to buy seeds from the market. Often, they turn out to be the last farmers still growing that variety, or it might even be the last year they’re cultivating it. So whenever we collect a seed, we immediately analyze it and record its passport data, where it came from, its name, and its origin,” Shikha explained. 

They also organize a annual Wild Food Festival to spread awareness about native seeds and wild foods. Wild foods are plants, fruits, roots, mushrooms, greens, and other edible items that grow naturally in forests, grasslands, or uncultivated lands, without being planted, fertilized, or managed by humans. 

They are collected by local or tribal communities and form an important part of traditional diets.

“The whole idea behind the Wild Food Festival was to show consumers that there is food beyond what they usually know, especially wild foods. We offer 10 course meals for people to taste and enjoy, along with dialogues led by experts from different fields. The festival isn’t just for consumers but also students, future chefs, and all stakeholders leave with more knowledge than they came in with.” says Shikha. 

To ensure farmers get the true value of their produce and to bring back nutritious food to urban plates, they sell native varieties of rice, maize, wheat, and more on their website. 

Harrisons Malayalam’s award winning tea

Posted on October 24th, 2025

For Indians, tea is not just a beverage, it is a ritual, a conversation maker, and a lifestyle. The concoction helps us tide through sleepy mornings and tiring afternoons. However, every once in a while, a tea comes along that reminds us why this humble drink is an artform in itself. 

From the lush hills of Wayanad, Kerala, the 100-year old Arrapetta Estate’s tea is gathering international acclaim. The estate, operated by Harrisons Malayalam, grows tea that recently won the gold medal at the North America Tea Competition. 

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“The Arapetta Estate’s tea has a unique character, floral notes due to its location and the traditional processing methods perfected over decades,” says Cherian George, CEO and Whole-time Director at Harrison Malayalam.

The tea is not mass produced and enjoys a neutral character with a balance between flavor and body, making it versatile and easy to blend with floral or herbal infusions. 

The Tea behind the tea

The success of the Arapetta Estate comes from a combination of things which include a hard working team of tea planters and latest technology. 

 “Tea plucking depends heavily on weather and timing. We now use shoot prediction models and weather stations to ensure we harvest at the optimum stage,” George explains. *By combining experience with digital precision, the company ensures that every leaf is plucked at the perfect moment, neither too young nor too mature to bring out the tea’s best qualities.

The estate works directly with 750 workers, 60% of which are women. “They receive equal remuneration and full statutory benefits,” says George. 

Beyond its own estate, Harrison Malayalam partners with nearly 600 small farmers, offering fair prices and transparent trade. “We have a pricing mechanism that ensures 58–60% of the factory price goes back to the farmer,” George says. 

Better quality fetches them higher prices, improving their income.”This long-standing relationship of trust and shared growth has built a loyal community of growers,” he adds. 

Harrisons Malayalam exports to the UK, Germany, Italy, Iran, and Georgia, among others. With this latest recognition, the company hopes to break into the US’s niche speciality tea market.

To ensure that the best quality reaches these markets, the company follows ethical farming standards and has been repeatedly certified by the Rainforest Alliance, Fairtrade organizations, and ISO for its safety and environmental compliance.

“Since the tea is grown in open fields, it’s exposed to weather variations, pest pressure, and diseases, especially during the monsoon and wet seasons. To address this, we’ve established a clear protocol and standard operating procedure (SOP) to take proactive preventive measures before the season begins,” explains Cherian. 

Besides exporting the tea, the company also sells the CTC version of the tea to brands like Tata Consumer Products and Wagh Bakri Tea Group. 

Watch: This is the most expensive floral perfume

Posted on June 9th, 2025

In the world of luxury perfumes, jasmine and rose are the king and queen—no floral fragrance is complete without them. And some 100,000 farmers in a tiny area around Madurai produce the world’s best jasmine that powers scents by Dior, Guerlain or Tom Ford. It takes more than 1,000 kilos of these tiny milky-white flowers to make just one kilo of jasmine oil—an oil that sells for nearly ₹4 lakh. The jasmine sambac or Madurai jasmine is considered a symbol of love, beauty and purity. In this video we find out how the unique geography and climate of Madurai produce the ‘intoxicant queen of the night’ that goes into a bottle the world’s rich and famous are ready to splurge on.

Why precision agriculture is India’s best bet against climate uncertainty

Posted on June 9th, 2025

The Indian agriculture has always been a story of grit and resilience— navigating the rhythms of monsoons, shifting seasons, and evolving market demands. But today, the stakes are far higher. Climate change is no longer a distant threat—it is a present and growing challenge impacting millions of farmers every day. Unseasonal heatwaves, erratic rainfall, and extreme weather conditions are disrupting traditional farming cycles, threatening both livelihoods and national food security. India is among the most climate-sensitive agricultural economies in the world.

According to the Indian Meteorological Department, 2023 was India’s fifth warmest year on record, with severe heatwaves affecting over 20 million hectares of farmland. Meanwhile, the Economic Survey 2023–24 reports a 4–6% decline in wheat and rice productivity in some states over the last five years—a stark indicator of the mounting pressure on our food systems.

In late 2024, farmers in Rajasthan faced temperatures soaring 2–7°C above normal, prompting a shift to more heat-resilient crops. At the same time, flash floods devastated large tracts of farmland in Himachal Pradesh and Kerala. With over 55% of India’s agricultural land still dependent on monsoons, the need to transition from reactive to predictive farming has never been more urgent. To feed 1.4 billion people sustainably while conserving natural resources, India must accelerate the adoption of climate-smart farming practices—anchored in data, powered by technology, and driven by insights.

Precision farming: A sustainable solution

The answer lies in precision agriculture—a transformative approach that combines technology with traditional wisdom. By leveraging real-time data, remote sensing, AI, and IoT, farmers can make better decisions about when, where, and how to farm. This shift from input-heavy to insight-driven agriculture is not just sustainable; it is smart economics.

Precision farming helps optimize every drop of water, every unit of fertilizer, and every minute of farm labor. Variable rate technology (VRT), for example, enables targeted application of nutrients and crop protection, reducing input costs by up to 30%. GPS-guided sowing and harvesting increase efficiency and minimize wastage. Netafim India has been at the forefront of this transformation.

Drip irrigation, a cornerstone of precision agriculture, delivers water and nutrients directly to the plant root zone. Studies show it can save 30–70% of water while boosting crop productivity by 20–60%. In water-stressed regions, this can mean the difference between crop failure and a bumper harvest. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) estimates that adopting precision farming methods can increase productivity by 15–25% while reducing input usage by up to 35%. These are not just numbers, they represent better incomes, reduced risk, and a pathway to climate resilience.

Data: the new fertilizer

Technology is becoming the new lifeline of Indian agriculture. With over 1,300 AgriTech startups and a projected market value of $24 billion by 2025 (as per FICCI-EY), innovation is rapidly democratising access to digital soil maps, crop analytics, precision irrigation, and weather forecasting.

Startups are offering AI-based crop advisories, drone-enabled field operations, and market linkages, helping farmers make better decisions and improve profitability. These innovations, once considered niche, are now gaining scale thanks to robust policy support and expanding infrastructure. Government initiatives such as the Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for agriculture, Per Drop More Crop under RKVY, and PM-KUSUM for solar irrigation are laying the foundation for a digitally connected and tech-enabled rural economy. The Unified Farmers Service Platform (UFSP) is an important step in integrating critical services—from weather alerts and crop insurance to credit access—into a unified, farmer-centric ecosystem. Together, public policy and private innovation are enabling a shift from reactive to proactive agriculture. India is not just digitizing farming—it is futureproofing it.

Digital tools are no longer optional, they are essential. From soil health cards to satellite-based yield forecasting and blockchain-enabled supply chains, data-driven technologies are redefining how farms are managed. The result is greater resilience, reduced input dependency, and improved environmental outcomes. Schemes like Agri Infra Fund, and the National Mission on Sustainable Agriculture (NMSA) are accelerating this transition. By promoting solar irrigation, post-harvest infrastructure, and precision solutions, these policies are making climate-smart agriculture accessible, particularly for smallholders. The Government’s push for DPI is helping ensure that even marginal farmers benefit from these innovations. Seamless service delivery through digital platforms is bridging information gaps and enabling smarter, faster decisions at the farm level.

As India’s population is projected to touch 1.7 billion by 2050, food demand is expected to rise by nearly 70%. Meeting this demand sustainably—without expanding arable land—requires a fundamental shift in how we farm. As India moves toward its centenary milestone in 2047, we must ensure that every farmer is climate-ready, tech-enabled, and financially empowered. Precision agriculture is not just about increasing yields—it’s about making farming future-proof. By adopting sustainable practices, optimizing resource use, and embracing innovation, we can build a farming ecosystem that is not only more productive but also more resilient to climate shocks. This is essential not just for farmers, but for the nation’s food and economic security.

It’s time to reimagine Indian agriculture—not just as a sector, but as a smart, sustainable ecosystem rooted in tradition and driven by innovation.

(Vikas Sonawane is COO, Netafim India)

How citizen science is revolutionizing water management in Indian agri

Posted on June 9th, 2025

Across India’s farmlands, the water table is dropping faster than ever, and the data meant to protect it is falling short. Decisions that shape the future of farming are still made with outdated maps, incomplete surveys, and distant models that miss what’s right beneath the soil. But that’s beginning to change, not through high-tech labs alone, but through a new force reshaping rural India: farmers themselves.

Agriculture consumes more than 80% of India’s water, yet the way we manage it has long relied on incomplete data and top-down decisions. Government assessments often focus on macro-level indicators, which may not fully account for site-specific variables like borewell depth or moisture levels in the soil. Check dams are built, but dry up. Aquifers are tapped, but rarely replenished. And all the while, farmers are left to make high-stakes decisions: when to plant, how much to irrigate, what to expect from the next season.

But what if the very people facing the brunt of these choices were equipped and empowered to inform them?

The data dilemma

A recent study by the Sattva Knowledge Institute found that every year, corporations pour over ₹265 crores into water conservation efforts. But here’s the catch: over half of that money goes into one-time studies that often remain behind paywalls. The data doesn’t reach the hands of farmers. It doesn’t help policymakers come up with long-term solutions. And crucially, it rarely captures the real, ground-level dynamics: the borewells that go unnoticed, the aquifers that silently dry up.

Official monitoring systems mostly track shallow wells, missing the deeper borewells farmers actually depend on. The result? Skewed estimates, misplaced interventions, and growing mistrust between rural communities toward government schemes.

The Citizen Science Solution

A different approach is helping shift this dynamic – treating farmers as citizen scientists, partners in gathering, interpreting, and acting on water data. It’s not about replacing satellites or experts. It’s about connecting their insights to what’s happening on the ground.

Open-source platforms like CoRESTACK are leading the way. In Tamil Nadu’s Kaveri Delta, for instance, farmers worked with researchers to map over 800 wells, revealing that borewells are drilled up to ten times deeper than those the government tracks. That single insight has changed how irrigation decisions are made, moving from guesswork to evidence-based planning.

Grassroots tech with real impact

Government-backed tools are also stepping up. The Jaldoot App, launched by the Ministry of Rural Development, trains village volunteers—aptly named Jaldoots—to measure well levels twice a year. It’s simple, low-cost, and effective. These measurements help identify water-stressed areas, informing farmers when to sow, how to conserve, and where to focus community efforts. Unlike expensive corporate studies, this model is scalable, grassroots, and built to last.

In Maharashtra, a Water Budget Dashboard developed by IIT Bombay ran into a common problem: the satellite-derived soil data wasn’t accurate enough. The fix? Turn to farmers. By incorporating their observations on local soil texture, the project created a high-resolution tool that provides hourly water balance estimates. That’s not just data, that’s real-time guidance farmers can use.

From data collectors to decision-makers

It’s not just about collecting better data, but about who gets a seat at the decision-making table. The Composite Landscape Assessment & Restoration Tool (CLART), developed by the Foundation for Ecological Security, enables even semi-literate rural communities to design water harvesting structures tailored to their land. In over 1,500 Gram Panchayats, farmers are designing ponds and recharge systems that actually work, because they’re based on local knowledge, not generic templates.

These efforts succeed because they blend top-down and bottom-up data. Satellite platforms like India-WRIS offer invaluable regional insights on groundwater levels, cropping patterns, and rainfall trends. Complementing these, however, is the need for more granular data to inform decisions at the village level. CoRESTACK takes it further, mapping wells with sub-meter accuracy. Yet even that’s not enough without farmer input. Only they can report on borewell use, seasonal water shifts, or sudden changes in recharge patterns.

Building the future together

The path forward is clear. Corporates must move beyond isolated studies and partner with local communities. Funding open-data ecosystems, supporting NGO-led training, and embracing farmer-generated inputs will create a shared knowledge base that benefits everyone, from the policy table to the paddy field.

Platforms like India Observatory and CoRESTACK can democratize access to essential indicators—drought frequency, soil moisture, and crop suitability. When farmers are equipped with this data, they don’t just adapt, they innovate. They become co-authors of their future.

The new water stewards

This goes beyond just about apps or dashboards, it’s about changing how we see our farmers. They’re more than beneficiaries; they’re active participants, planners, and custodians of India’s water resources. Furthermore, tools like Jaldoot and CLART prove that local knowledge, when properly harnessed, can outmatch even the most sophisticated models in relevance and impact. As India stares down a looming water crisis, embracing citizen science isn’t just smart – it’s essential.

The answer to India’s water woes won’t come solely from boardrooms or bureaucracies. It will come from fields, farms, and village wells, where data meets lived experience, and where farmers, armed with insight and agency, reclaim their role as guardians of the land.

(Debaranjan Pujahari is a Partner at Sattva Consulting, where he leads the Agriculture Practice Area, and Kangkanika Neog is an Engagement Manager with the Agriculture Practice at Sattva Consulting.)

Jasmine’s journey: From the fields of Madurai to French luxury perfume

Posted on June 2nd, 2025

Seethapuram is a small, squalid village home largely to Telugu-speaking Naickers, at the foot of the Western Ghats, some 50km northwest of Madurai. Overnight showers, unseasonal in late March, make it hard to see puddles from open sewers in the darkness of 3am.

The village is not just stirring; its people are out and about.

Chinnaraman, 54, and his wife Murugayi, 48, are both dressed in sky-blue half-sleeved shirts. She wears hers over a sari, and he adds a grey flannel jacket on top. They are ready to leave for their farm, a ten-minute ride over undulating terrain on a grunting 100cc bike.

A multicoloured rooster, perched on a moringa branch outside their newly built home painted in grape purple with psychedelic ceramic tiles, has timed its crow to match their routine.
Walking briskly along slippery grass bunds, barefoot, they switch on the heavy-duty lamps strapped to their foreheads. The first order of business is harvesting roses.
Two fingers—index and thumb—a twist and snap. Snap, snap, snap. After an hour and about two thousand flowers, it’s time to move on to the jasmines in an adjoining section of their three-acre land.

The night bloom
Harvesting jasmine, or specifically, jasmine sambac, commonly known as Madurai malli, requires the same two fingers but no snap. Pffff, pfff, pfff… a hoovering sound only audible to the fingers. The jasmine buds are far more numerous and more delicate than roses. They go into the sari and lungi pouches like a kangaroo’s marsupium. There is no time to catch a breath or engage in small talk. In the darkness dotted by headlamps, they need to be alert to the rustle of insects and even snakes. This being hardcore Ilaiyaraaja country, his music blasts through PA systems of distant temples celebrating all-night fests. Humming along is the only form of distraction.

In the crimson gauze of dawn, when moonlight and the headlamps are in a gentle tussle, the closest flat-top hill, blue-black and covered in a tablecloth of cloud, comes into view first. This truel-de-lux of natural and artificial sources makes the jasmines, springing forth from the red soil, seem like stars in an upside-down sky. The pink roses glint like rubies, and the pale yellow chrysanthemums glow, positively neon. The cattle egrets start swooping to the ground, their flight elegant, keeping time with the peacocks’ vuvuzela-cry. The couple’s farm of flowers, in that moment, is as fetching as their village is bleak.

A race against time

By 7.30am, when the magic of light and sound has faded and the heat draws sweat from every pore, Chinnaraman and Murugayi have collected two kilos of jasmine. If Chinnaraman can reach the wholesale market in Nilakottai, six kilometers away, by 8am, the flowers will command the day’s peak price of ₹350–400 per kilo, earning a handy ₹800 for their first shift.

This is where the world’s best jasmine, the Madurai malli, grows. And this is the kind of backbreaking work that gets it to travel the world.
It can reach the local temples for puja throughout the day. It can rest around the neck of stone statues that are worshipped, be strung into garlands and the strings that women wear. It can catch the afternoon flight to cities like Mumbai and Delhi, even Dubai, Singapore or San Francisco, where it’s coveted by the Indian diaspora. It might even end up in a bottle of super-luxury perfume that the world’s rich and famous are happy to splurge on.

Ancient roots
“Jasmine and rose are the king and queen of any luxury perfume with floral notes you can think of. And the jasmine sambac, or Madurai malli, is the soul of any high-end floral perfume made by brands such as Dior, Guerlain or Tom Ford,” says Raja Palaniswami, the founder and director of Jasmine Concrete, the largest floral extraction firm in India based in Madurai.

Of the nearly 200 species of jasmine, some 90 grow in India. The most prized among them is jasmine sambac, known globally as Arabian jasmine—a somewhat misleading moniker since it is native to India and this is where it is grown on the biggest commercial scale. Besides Madurai, it is cultivated in other parts of Tamil Nadu, the Mysuru region, Andhra Pradesh and even Bengal and the northeast.

Madurai is one of the most ancient cities in India, the literary and cultural heart of Tamil civilization. During the Tamil Sangam era—estimated from around 300 BCE to 300 CE—Madurai served as the epicenter for academies of poets and scholars that nurtured classical Tamil literature and language. The city’s ancient Meenakshi Temple and the legend of the divine wedding of Meenakshi and Shiva’s most enchanting form, Sundareshwara, are inextricably linked to Tamil culture.
A Sangam Tamil poem recounts the generosity of a local chieftain, Pari, who could not bear to see a delicate jasmine creeper lying on the hard forest floor. He gifted his royal chariot to the plant so it could twine itself around the wheels and rest more comfortably.

Bold and heady
Modern Madurai is a pulsating city, loud and proud in every way. Its festivals are boisterous, its food bursts with big flavors, and even the banners announcing weddings or mundane ceremonies like ear-piercing are larger than life. Madurai’s influence on Tamil culture is so outsized that it can verily be called the Punjab of Tamil Nadu.

The jasmine sambac, or Madurai malli, is no different. This tiny milky-white flower, no larger than a thumbnail, has 8–12 petals and grows on an evergreen shrub that reaches three feet in height and can last 7–10 years.
Madurai’s red laterite soil, rich in sulfur and a climate that is hot and humid for much of the year, produces a jasmine whose fragrance is bold, heady, and intense, untouched by nuance. It carries no citrusy tang, no woody or spicy warmth—only pure, unadulterated floral power. In the company of this jasmine, it is always a glorious day or the darkest night. It can take you to the peaks of amorous passion, or into the depths of devotion.

A personal connection
The sight and smell of jasmine fill me with pleasure. I can’t quite explain why—perhaps it’s the intensity that lodges itself permanently in the nostrils—but it evokes vivid, sunken memories. Having spent part of my childhood and all of my adolescence in Chennai, jasmine remains the scent of a warm place I call home. About 25 years ago, as a struggling, homesick journalist getting by on a shoestring in Delhi, I would always save at least ₹10 to buy a small string of jasmine as I walked back to my depressing tenement in the erstwhile Tamil ghetto of Munirka. I placed it around a tiny laminated picture of Ranganatha. By the time the stove—less efficient than a Bunsen burner—produced a hot one-pot meal, the flowers, accompanied by Ilaiyaraaja or Carnatic music, would take me on a journey to the banks of the Kaveri in Srirangam via Chennai. In those moments, life felt worth the struggle—and sometimes even beautiful.

“Such a small thing can be so iconic of so many bigger things: love, beauty, and purity. Of course, it is the favorite flower of Goddess Meenakshi, which was partly responsible for luring her husband, Shiva. But when a man meets his beloved, the most precious thing he can offer is a potlam—a small packet—of malli,” says Uma Kannan, a PhD in social and cultural anthropology who has spent years researching the flower and even written a book on it. Uma is married into one of the richest business families in South India, firmly rooted in Madurai. Her father-in-law, Karumuttu Thiagaraja Chettiar was a staunch nationalist during the British Raj. He founded swadeshi businesses spanning textile mills to banking, alongside educational institutions and philanthropies. Recognizing Uma’s love for jasmine, her husband Kannan Thiagarajan gifted her not a potlam, but a jasmine extraction business.

“He kept it a secret and told me only six or seven months before the factory became operational. He said it was for me to run, but he passed away in 2023 before it was inaugurated,” says Uma, clad in a pink silk sari at her Madurai family home with enough Chola bronze statues to make many Indian museums feel inadequate.

The French connection
While Madurai has been synonymous with jasmine for centuries, the French luxury perfume industry discovered it only recently. In 1989, Jean-Paul Guerlain, a fourth-generation master perfumer at the 200-year-old luxury firm (now owned by the LVMH Group), used Madurai jasmine to create a perfume called Samsara. Its success made every fragrance manufacturer seek out this precious sambac.
Thierry Wasser, the Swiss master perfumer and “nose” of Guerlain since 2008, has created perfumes like Dior’s Addict and Guerlain’s L’Homme Idéal. He was bowled over by the Madurai jasmine and now makes an annual visit to the region—not just to check on the quality of the flowers and the sustainability of the farmers, but also for inspiration.

“I wasn’t really acquainted with jasmine sambac much before. When I saw how people here used it—religious rituals, weddings, and celebrations—I suddenly understood the power of this flower. It stands for a celebration of love, friendship, brotherhood, and even your most secret hopes to the Gods,” says Wasser, waxing lyrical about Madurai jasmine, his dramatic Gallic gestures matching his words.

The variety of jasmine called grandiflorum, called jathi malli in Tamil, with buds that are spear-shaped and a pink tint, was grown in the southern France region around Grasse bordering Italy. Along with rose, it had been a staple in floral fragrances.
“Since Europe is cold, people used a lot of leather goods like gloves and jackets, and it doesn’t have a pleasing smell. The French found that they could mask the smell of leather by macerating it with the jasmine grandiflorum flowers readily available there. That’s when they realized they could make extractions from it,” says Raja Palaniswami.
When production of flowers in France became too expensive, the perfume companies looked elsewhere—initially to places closer to home such as Morocco and Egypt.
That’s when they discovered India grew grandiflorum in abundance. “But in India they got swept away by the power of jasmine sambac. Which is why it is the rock star among flowers today,” says Palaniswami, whose firm supplies jasmine and other floral extracts to luxury perfumers.

The jasmine season begins in March with the onset of summer and lasts until October. When the bushes fully mature in three years, farmers can harvest up to 4–6 tons of jasmine from an acre every season.
The early morning’s first harvest usually fetches farmers up to ₹450/kg while in the main city markets like Mattuthavani in Madurai, standing cheek-by-jowl to the primary bus stand, it can sell for ₹500–600/kg. But the harvesting continues through the day. Only the buds are plucked so that they can blossom en route without losing fragrance. The afternoon harvest finds its way to the numerous fragrance factories in the region. Companies like Palaniswami’s Jasmine Concrete pick it up at the farmgate at ₹300/kg. Although lower, it’s an insurance against price fluctuations in the open market.

Maria Velankanni, 48, is a farmer who looks many years younger, with a thick crop of hair, wearing a blue shirt and a matching lungi, in Kamalapuram, a village 50km from Madurai. Unmarried, he likes to think of his land and crops as family. “The jasmine grows well in our land because of the red soil and the heat. The heat gives it a unique smell. The Madurai jasmine is much thicker than other varieties. It can withstand long journeys to other parts of India and overseas even,” he says. Velankanni now prefers to sell to extraction companies for a fixed rate instead of making the daily dash to wholesale markets.

The fragrance extraction factories come to life after sundown. Tonnes of jasmine in wet jute sacks start arriving in mini-trucks by 8pm. The buds are dried and let bloom in large sheltered yards, spread out by a combination of feet and rakes. Once the moisture content is down, the flowers are loaded onto what seem like giant idli plates in a steamer and sent into the extractor. There they are subjected to hexane, a highly combustible, colorless hydrocarbon in liquid form, that can trap the aromatic molecules of jasmine. After the hexane is evaporated, a waxy substance called “concrete” remains. After this treatment, the “spent” jasmine flowers smell no different from tomato residue post pulp extraction.

The waxy concrete is then washed with alcohol to produce the liquid gold called jasmine absolute, which can be stored for decades. It is the most concentrated version of jasmine’s flavours. It takes 1,000 kg of jasmine to produce a litre of absolute. Raja Palaniswami’s factory in Madurai can produce 120 kilolitres of jasmine extract a day. A 100ml bottle of perfume needs as little as 1ml of this absolute. Lighter products like eau de toilette need even less. Applying a tiny drop of jasmine absolute directly on the skin might leave you with burns, not to mention, making you smell like a string of flowers for a few weeks.

However, jasmine farming has its unique challenges beyond the flower’s extremely perishable nature—its value and fragrance fall by the minute after it is harvested. Jasmine needs more pesticides than even vegetables. “We need to spray the field every four days and each spray costs ₹4,000,” says Ravindran, 27, an industrial engineer who works as a supervisor at a jasmine factory at night and helps his father Chinnaraman in the fields by day. Between 3pm and 5pm, the jasmine fields bring the deafening roar of diesel-powered pesticide sprayers; the sweetness of jasmine is doused by the acrid, metallic smell of engine fumes.

R Moorthy, 34, a tall sinewy farmer in Kamalapuram, gave up on jasmine some years ago. The high cost of cultivation was getting out of hand, and heavy doses of pesticides and fertilizers were wrecking his soil.
“A few years ago, I started attending programmes conducted by government and private jasmine factory agri-experts. There I discovered that it was possible to grow jasmine using natural inputs without chemicals. Now I grow it on a quarter acre in a fully natural way. The yields are fine, I get more money per kilo and more importantly, the soil has regained its health,” he says, showing his farm around wearing a pair of flip-flops, a printed blue shirt and an ochre veshti that matches the color of the land.

The lure of jasmine for the farmers, despite all the odds, is understandable. Unlike crops like rice or pulses, it brings valuable everyday income. Farmers such as Chinnaraman, for instance, can make a profit of up to ₹600,000 a year, especially with rising demand from perfume factories around.

Being part of an international supply chain brings some benefits.
“Customers and investors globally are asking companies like LVMH questions on traceability and sustainability of their products. There is the realization that if we don’t do things right today, there may not be a tomorrow,” says Palaniswami. Of the 2,500 farmers his company deals with directly, around 700 have been introduced to practices that minimize or even shun the use of chemicals.

For Thierry Wasser, a trained botanist, buying ingredients for his perfumes is a human adventure.
“You don’t buy jasmine, vetiver or rose from the market. You buy it from people. It’s a connection with life. The health of the people, the soil and biodiversity itself is of fundamental importance,” he says.

Meenakshi of Madurai may not disagree.