• Social Entrepreneur

Vijaya Pastala always knew she wanted to work in the ‘livelihoods’ space. She just didn’t know how till she read a National Commission of Farmers report published in 1976 talking about the importance of honey bees in agriculture. Today, Vijaya’s organization Under The Mango Tree (UTMT) trains tribal, rural women, and small farmers in beekeeping and encourages them to take up apiculture as an important part of their daily basket of agri-activities.

These bees help cross pollination of farmers’ crops, thus leading to increase in yield and productivity and eventually enhance the livelihoods of rural farmers. Pastala’s enterprise clocked revenues of Rs.15 lakh for the year ended March 31, 2011 and is aiming to reach revenues of Rs.40 lakh this year.

The beginning
Pastala’s work related to a World Bank development project brought her to Mumbai in 2005. That was when the thought of starting out on her own first struck her. “I did a preliminary market scan and figured that there were a lot of NGOs actively working in the livelihoods enhancement space. However, most of them lacked a business perspective and a conduit to the market. I founded UTMT primarily as a platform for rural producers to access markets,” says Pastala, Founder, UTMT. 2005 was also the year when Pepsi got into contract farming. In the next few years, Reliance and Big Bazaar also entered the retail market for agro produce. “Suddenly there was a dearth of good suppliers in the market. UTMT started out aiming to fill in this gap by becoming a platform connecting rural producers to the market,” says Pastala.

Bee wise
She registered UTMT as a sole proprietorship in 2007 and opened a bank account to manage her finances. In the initial days, there was a strong focus on research. It was during this phase that Pastala laid her hands on the Government of India report mentioned above. “Statistics clearly indicated that breeding honey bees for agricultural productivity was about 14 times more lucrative than breeding them solely for honey.

The Indian government had introduced the Italian bee Apis Mellifera into the country. This bee was high on productivity but not attuned to India’s climate. The government’s beekeeping training program was ineffective. UTMT changed its course to focus on offering training in beekeeping to tribal farmers. While pursuing this, we started building a brand (Tribal Gold) for retailing the honey produced by these farmers as a by-product of keeping bees on their farms,” says Pastala.

In 2008, she quit the World Bank to give all her time to UTMT. The firm devised an independent training module involving the Apis Indica or the indigenous Indian bee. To breed the Italian bee and maintain it, a farmer would have to invest up to Rs.5 lakh. This bee had the ability to produce up to 100 kilos of honey per box/per season. The Indian bee, on the other hand, produced up to 10 kilos of honey per box/per season.

However, the Apis Indica was much easier to breed and maintain. It had become resistant to Indian environmental conditions over the years and didn’t need to be migrated as often as the European bee. “Our target group comprised farmers earning Rs.18,000-Rs.24,000 annually. There was no way this group could afford the Apis Mellifera,” says Pastala. They tweaked the model in many other ways to make it feasible for on-ground implementation.

Crucial partnership
In March 2009, UTMT entered into a partnership with BAIF (Bharatiya Agro-industries Foundation) for its pilot implementation. BAIF was already working with farmers in rural Maharashtra and Gujarat and had a training center in Gujarat that Pastala’s team could use. “We started out by training farmers in BAIF-supported tribal wadis. We were clear from day one that we did not want to build our own ground-level infrastructure. There was already a strong NGO network in place, we simply had to tap into it and extend our reach,” says Pastala.

This was the point when the firm realized that no study had till then been conducted to measure the impact of bees on cross pollination and productivity of various crops. UTMT is currently in phase II of such a study where it is trying to tabulate the impact of bees on the yield of pulses, oilseeds etc. This research is being funded by the EdelGive Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Edelweiss Group. It is clear that Pastala’s project had many takers. The National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD) stepped in to offer beekeeping expertise for the pilot while UnLtd India, a seed fund and incubator for social entrepreneurs, stepped on board in 2009 to offer mentoring support and bring focus to various activities. In 2009, the UTMT society was started. “The front face of UTMT is a revenue-generating organization while at the back-end we offer all the support that farmers need,” says Pastala.

Challenges cleared
Talking about the challenges in the early stage, she adds, “The main challenge was money. You need working capital to pay salaries because we are a for-profit enterprise. And it is difficult to retain staff because we don’t have cushy jobs to offer. The other challenge was dealing with the farmer mindset. A farmer intervenes at every stage of the agricultural process except pollination. He understands pollination but doesn’t know that one can facilitate pollination. We explain how honey bees can help achieve that.”

On the revenue and cash flow front, UTMT expects to break even this year. In the second half of 2010, UTMT emerged as a winner in a competition called ‘Village Capital’, incubated in First Light Ventures, a sister enterprise to seed investing firm Gray Ghost Ventures. “We got investment of Rs.33 lakh from First Light Ventures,” says Pastala. This money will be used to scale up UTMT’s operations in the next few years.

“Last year, we sold about 8,000 bottles of honey. Our target for this year is to sell 4,000 a month,” says Pastala. The company is also eyeing the corporate gifting and hospitality sectors. In hospitality, the firm has just sealed its first successful deal with the Taj Group of Hotels.

UTMT has also earned a Rs.25 lakh zero-interest loan from Villgro Innovations Foundation, an organization that works toward transforming innovations into a market-ready form, to upgrade and professionalize its entire bottling operation. “Honey is difficult to bottle. It falls very slowly. As a result, you can’t automate operations easily. We will use Villgro’s money to increase our staffing strength and buy more drums for the honey bottling,” she concludes. It is clear that there is no stopping this woman with a mission.

Tags:
Apis, bee, beeking, Bharatiya Agro-Industries Foundation, honey, NABARD, NGO, Taj Group, under the mango tree, UTMT, Vijay Pastala's, Villgro, World Bank