NEWS

Son of the soil

The importance of 2020 World Food Prize winner Rattan Lal’s work

Rattan Lal has done America, his adopted land, and India, his home country, proud by becoming the 2020 winner of the World Food Prize, which is considered to be the Nobel for food-related research. The prominent Indian-American soil scientist is the eighth person of Indian origin to win the USD 250,000 prize, which was established in 1987 by the legendary Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose pioneering work led to India’s Green Revolution in the 1960s. The 75-year-old Lal has illustrious company. Past Indian winners of the prize include MS Swaminathan, who played a leading role in India’s Green Revolution, and Verghese Kurien, the ‘Father of the White Revolution’ and the man behind Amul and the dairy cooperative movement in India. Professor Lal, the director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, bagged the award for his soil-centric approach to ramp up food production, which not only conserves natural resources but also tackles the menace of climate change. While describing his “unbound joy and excitement” on getting the award, Lal said the “urgent task of feeding humanity is not fulfilled until each and every person has access to an adequate amount of nutritious food grown on a healthy soil and in a clean environment”. The man and his mission Born in pre-independence India in what is now Pakistan, Lal’s family migrated to India in 1947. He studied in what is often regarded as India’s greatest agricultural research institute, the Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana. He then did an MSc from Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, before heading to the Ohio State University, Columbus, US, which has become his home for 50 years. He has also served as research fellow and honorary professor in universities around the world. Lal’s most recent research has focussed on soil carbon sequestration, climateresilient agriculture, and enhancing use efficiency of agroecosystems among other things. According to his biographical note on The Indian-American soil scientist studied at the Punjab Agricultural University and Indian Agricultural Research Institute before heading to Ohio State University, which has been his home for 50 years.

the Ohio State University website, he has mentored 112 graduate students and 54 postdoctoral researchers, and authored/co-authored over 2,437 research publications, written 22 books and edited/co-edited more than 75 books. During his career that spans five decades, Lal has done pioneering work on farming techniques which not only prevent soil from losing vital nutrients but also put nutrients back in the soil. In his own words, this is a “soil-centric” approach to farming, which has important implications for mitigating climate change and preventing deforestation. Lal was mentioned as part of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds by Reuters in 2015 and 2016, and he is the 2018 winner of the Glinka World Soil Prize for his outstanding contribution towards sustainable soil management and protecting soil resources. Praising Lal’s work, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo said: “He’s helping the earth’s estimated 500 million small farmers be faithful stewards of their land through improved management, less soil degradation, and the recycling of nutrients. The billions of people who depend on these farms stand to benefit greatly from his work.” Source : timesnownews.com

Key High ligh ts

Professor Lal is the eighth person of Indian origin to win the USD 250,000 prize, which was established in 1987 by the legendary Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug He is the director of the Carbon Management and Sequestration Center at Ohio State University, and bagged the award for his soil-centric approach to ramp up food production During his career that spans five decades, Lal has done pioneering work on farming techniques which not only prevent soil from losing vital nutrients but also put nutrients back in the soil

News

Fintech startup Jai Kisan banks $3.9m to give India’s smallholder farmers access to cheaper finance

Ask any shopkeeper, milkman, dhobi (launderer), or other merchant in India how many people owe them money for their services, and how much they’re owed. You’re likely to get two high numbers. In fact, it’s common across the board for Indian businesses to serve their customers on credit and keep tabs. It’s true from the kirana kiosk selling cigarettes by the side of the street, all the way up to B2B enterprises selling equipment to farmers. “In India, merchant credit isn’t just a service – it’s an expectation,” says Arjun Ahluwalia, co-founder and CEO of freshly funded rural fintech startup Jai Kisan.

The problem is that the people at the bottom of the chain — such as smallholder farmers and other low-income rural workers — can’t always enjoy the same access to credit as those farther up, even though they’re often the most in need of it. Their financing needs tend to be much smaller but are seen as higher risk because they typically lack documentation on their business operations and cashflow; many don’t have a bank account or credit histories.

As a result, many financing providers prefer to steer clear of lending to farmers. And even when they do, they’ll lend via rural service providers such as agribusiness input vendors or farming equipment leasers, who typically attach their own mark-up to the loan.

“Most lenders want to give large tickets, to maintain their unit economics [when they’re traveling] out to the hinterland of country,” Ahluwalia tells AFN. “They also give [the capital] to a buyer or seller in the value chain, rather than giving it directly to the end customer. The reason is it’s significantly easier to give it to an equipment manufacturer rather than the farmer, because then they would have to do smaller loans and underwrite the farmers.”

This means that capital “sits at the neck of the bottle rather than flowing down,” he says.

Full-stack rural fintech

It’s a problem that Jai Kisan is hoping to solve with its “rural fintech fullstack platform,” which adopts a B2B2C approach to partner with intermediaries in the agricultural value chain so that they can lend to farmers at lower costs.

“We are able to get this capital down to end customers by digitally onboarding them. And we do this extremely cheaply,” Ahluwalia explains.

The Mumbai-based startup partners both with businesses that sell to farmers, such as input or equipment providers, and those that buy from farmers, such as agri-commodity traders and food processing firms. These partners act as sales agents for Jai Kisan and its lender clients, by offering finance as an add-on to the inputs they sell or by placing a tablet or laptop in their outlets that farmers can use to sign up.

“The partner is excited by this because, say you are an equipment dealer and [previously] took capital from the bank to lend it on to a farmer, you had to take that debt onto your books. We integrate those sellers and buyers for that loan origination to be able to happen on the spot,” Ahluwalia says.

Partners can then cut their markup, leading to lower interest rates for farmers and quicker turnaround times for all stakeholders. Jai Kisan can also act as a middleman between these partners and apex lenders, allowing it to cut interest rates to farmers even further by sourcing the best deals it can.

In the past six months, the startup has disbursed over ₹500 million ($6.56 million) in loans to over 5,500 borrowers across 10 states. It has partnered with three “blue chip” banks and five non-bank financial institutions, including microloan-focused Avanti Finance.

Arkam leads; first for Nabard

Investors seem to be impressed; Jai Kisan has just raised ₹300 million ($3.94 million) in a pre-series A funding round led by Arkam Ventures. Also joining in the round is NABVentures — the VC arm of Indian development finance institution (DFI), the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) — in its first-ever investment.

“Very few startups have the commanding view of a large, untapped space. Even fewer startups have the luxury of tailwinds in these challenging times,” said Arkam Ventures managing director Rahul Chandra in a statement.

“Jai Kisan is a rare combination of both of the above along with a unique business model that adds value to multiple participants of the agri-supply chain.”

Existing investors including Blume, Prophetic Ventures, and Better Capital also participated in the round alongside several other investors from the finance and agriculture sectors.

Jai Kisan plans to use its new funding to hire for roles across operations and tech, make its tech platform more robust to attract more DFIs and other lenders, and to leverage the customer data it has amassed to expand its offering beyond loans to other credit, insurance, and savings products.

It also wants to scale up geographically. Initially, this means expansion to more states within India. But the longer-term plan is to take its model to other markets in Asia and farther afield where the agricultural industry is dominated by lower-income, ‘underbanked’ smallholders. Jai Kisan co-founder and chief operating officer Adriel Maniego’s home country of the Philippines may well be the startup’s first international stop. He and Ahluwalia are former classmates from Texas A&M University in the US, where they later began careers in private equity and debt restructuring. Source : agfundernews.com

News

Urban joblessness at 31%, rural at 20%:

India’s salaried population is only a small fraction of its total work force — which explains why so many migrants had to move out of cities when the lockdown was announced on March 24. The International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates that only 22% of India’s workforce falls under the category of salaried employment while 78% had no assured salary and hence was bound to suffer during this period. Among major economies, India also ranks at the bottom on another parameter with more than 76% of workers categorised as being in vulnerable employment. That is, people classifying themselves as ownaccount workers or contributing family workers. Such workers are less likely to have formal work arrangements and hence lack decent working conditions and social security. Also, in a lockdown, many such people (like a cigarette shop owner) would be rendered jobless.

Researchers at Indian Institute of Technology- Madras have developed a simple microwave process to produce biofuel oils with high energy values from two waste products -- agricultural waste such as rice straw and bagasse and discarded plastics.

The urgency in search of renewable fuels is driven by the environmental impact of extracting fossil fuel and volatility in oil prices, associated political unrest across the world. Bio-fuel oils generated from renewable biological sources are considered a practical and pragmatic replacement for petroleum and petrochemicals.

The team was led by R Vinu, associate professor, department of chemical engineering, IIT-Madras.

The results of their work have been published recently in the reputed peer-reviewed journal Bioresource Technology and Fuel Processing Technology. The team included researchers like Dadi Suriapparao and Banupriya Boruah.

Elaborating on this research, Vinu said, “Biomass is the only renewable source of carbon on earth with immense potential for the production of energy, chemicals, and materials with zero carbon footprint on the environment. Agricultural waste products such as rice straw, sugarcane bagasse and wood chips, among others, can potentially serve as bio-oil producing biomass.”

One of the common methods to produce bio-oil from biomass is ‘pyrolysis’ or heat-induced breakdown of the biomass components into fuel components. However, bio-oil produced by the pyrolysis of biomass contains large amounts of oxygenated groups or ‘oxygenates,’ far greater than in fossil fuels. These ‘oxygenates’ result in lower heat

CMIE’s weekly unemployment data is collated by a survey. The survey for the last week of March had to be ended abruptly because of the lockdown and is based on 2,289 ob

IIT-Madras research team produces high energy bio-oil from agricultural and plastic waste

servations evenly spread over rural and urban areas, it said. ing value of bio-oils, compared to fossil fuels, and in addition, increase their acidity and corrosiveness.

Plastics that are rich in hydrogen, can serve as the hydrogen supplier to biomass in its conversion to low-oxygenate bio-oils. The use of plastics as supporting material in the pyrolysis of biomass would ultimately serve two purposes – it would produce bio-oils with better properties and also help in repurposing used plastic.

“We believe that microwave-assisted pyrolysis process is a sustainable and energy efficient approach for resource recovery from a wide variety of wastes such as biomass agri residues, plastic wastes including disposed single-use plastics and non-reusable face masks, and a mixture of these,” added Vinu. Source : timesofindia.indiatimes.com