• Social Entrepreneur

Imagine running an enterprise where earthworms are your primary workers! And you have to protect them from birds and rats. Going a step further, you have to understand their production cycle and lifecycle. Sounds unusual? Well, Nirmala Kandalgaonkar does exactly that. Hailing from Aurangabad, in Maharashtra, Kandalgaonkar runs a solid waste management company called Vivam Agrotech that is functional in the areas of vermicompost, compost, biogas with electricity generation, carbon credits, municipal solid waste management and waste water treatment.

Kandalgaonkar started Vivam Agrotech as a sole proprietorship firm in June 2001. Today, it is a private limited company expecting to clock revenue worth Rs.30 lakh for FY 2010-’11.

The seeds of her entrepreneurial journey were sown during her tenure of social work in the villages of Kandhar taluka in Nanded district of Maharashtra. Kandalgaonkar served as a member of the RSS and went to these villages to teach their women various skills and make them literate. “There was always one thought lingering at the back of my mind. Couldn’t we give these women an opportunity to earn? What could be an optimal and sustainable means of livelihood for them? Most of the locals were involved in agriculture and using chemical fertilizers in their fields. This was affecting the soil. This led me to think that if vermicompost units were installed in the village, they could process their agri-waste in-house and produce manure (compost) from the same for their crops,” says Kandalgaonkar.

She started Vivam Agrotech in her own terrace by building a vermicompost unit, buying earthworms from the market, and giving the compost/manure produced to the women in Nanded to test it in their fields. Her initial investment was Rs.50,000 and a major part of that was directed toward R&D costs and travelling to various agricultural universities across the country to gather inputs from academia. “Once the model was successful, the village women would be able to replicate it in their fields. The feasibility of a vermicompost unit lies in the fact that raw material is easily accessible and free while the finished product finds a market locally. There is no hassle at either end of the supply chain,” explains Kandalgaonkar.

Vermicompost Solutions
After dedicated research, scientific study and experimentation, Kandalgaonkar started making rectangular vermicompost units of size 5”X20” and 2 feet deep called ‘Mahakay’ and selling them to farmers and rural women. These were made from steel mesh and had a waste processing capacity of 2-3 tons per month. The cost of each unit was Rs.15,000 (at that point); however, the government offered a subsidy to farmers to buy these units. The company employed four people who manufactured these units in a workshop in Aurangabad.

“There are about 250-300 varieties of earthworms in India. From these, only two to three varieties are good for vermicomposting. Effort was needed to identify these, to understand the lifecycle of earthworms, the optimum temperature and moisture levels for their survival and reproduction, and the testing of various inputs and outputs in a simulated environment,” she says.

In the first year of operations, they sold 12 units. In 2002 (second year), this figure went up to 40 units and the company broke even in the same year too. “Our initial orientation was toward serving the needs of farmers. However, as word-of-mouth publicity happened, bungalow owners and city dwellers started approaching us to make smaller units for residences. Most bungalows in cities like Aurangabad and Pune have sprawling lawns and a good amount of garden waste that could be processed using our units. Thus, our market just expanded,” says Kandalgaonkar. Following this development, Vivam Agrotech started manufacturing customized units by 2004.

Residence Woes
They were now serving a wide market of urban co-operative societies, bungalows and residences, five-star hotels, restaurants, temples and, of course, farmers. A problem arose while serving residence owners. While farmers followed operating instructions well, residents messed up and either put more or less water than needed.

The food waste being processed in urban areas also often held the water longer than needed leading to less than optimal production conditions. This challenge led Kandalgaonkar and her team (her elder son also works in the business) to invest further in R&D and devise a biogas plant apt for processing kitchen and food waste.

“It was difficult for us to monitor the working of each vermicompost unit that we sold in urban areas. We went a step further and devised a compact, automated and ready-to-use biogas unit/plant for sale in urban areas. We spent about Rs.5 lakh this time round for R&D,” says Kandalgaonkar.

The company got excellent customer feedback for its first few units but it kept working on product innovation and evolution. In 2006, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center (BARC) in Mumbai released a new technology for biogas manufacturing. Vivam Agrotech entered into a technical tie-up with BARC and paid the latter a one-time fee of Rs.50,000 for use of its technology. This helped the company to scale up immensely.

In 2007, the company decided to approach Sintex Industries for commercial manufacturing of biogas units. The arrangement worked out and Vivam became the official installation and commissioning agent for biogas plants made by Sintex. “Our design was such that each unit was made from one single mould. There were no nuts and bolts used anywhere. It had two openings for input and output and the process of decomposting the waste was anaerobic and involved microbes or bacteria. We had seen the Deenbandhu gobar gas units functional in rural areas so that helped us,” says Kandalgaonkar.

After moving up the value chain with biogas, there was no looking back for Vivam Agrotech. Toward the end of the decade, the firm bagged a contract to build a waste processing plant with a capacity of 1.5 tons per day for the municipal council of Chandrapur city in eastern Maharashtra. This marked the company’s foray into municipal solid waste management.

For this first project, BARC was the company’s implementation partner and technical support provider. The SBI also stepped in with a loan. Today, it has won a contract to build and operate 10 waste processing plants under the aegis of the Pune Municipal Council. For these plants, the company has gone a step further in the evolution such that the end product generated is electricity which can be put to direct use for serving various municipality functions. Also, it is offering consulting to municipal councils and state governments. With newer and stricter norms coming up for real estate companies relating to in-house waste processing, there is scope for Vivam Agrotech to cater to this market. The company got its first real estate client in 2008.

Priority-wise
On a concluding note, Kandalgaonkar says that the main challenge in her business lies in the fact that waste management is almost always a last priority for consumers. Also, each project that is built for a municipality commands huge maintenance cost. However, the satisfaction is huge.

“I feel that I am paying back the debt of nature or nisargrun in some way. Whatever comes from nature, it has the ability to take it back and process it. That completes the natural cycle in fact. This includes all biodegradable waste while for non-biodegradable waste, there is already a thriving industry. For the success of any business, all you need to do is set your mind to it. The rest will follow automatically,” she signs off.

©Entrepreneur April 2011

Tags:
biogas, carbon credits, compost, electricity, municipal solid waste management, Nirmala Kandalgaonkar, vermicompost, Vivam Agrotech, Waste management, waste water treatment