Guest Lecture – Mr. Prem Rathod

Report on Guest Lecture

Topic: How to emerge as a purposeful progressive entrepreneur?

Resource Person: Mr. PREM RATHOD

Conducted on: 2^nd July 2022

The Indus Business Academy organized a guest lecture on ‘How to emerge as a purposeful progressive entrepreneur?’ The lecture was held on 2^nd July of 2022 in AMA Audi for the new batch of 2022-24, Mr. Prem Rathod, the Founder & CEO of KisanSaathi, a platform that acts as a one-forestall technique to farmers, Agri commodity shoppers, and different individuals throughout the value chain for various agriculture-related needs like farm inputs, farm consultancy services, post-harvest practices, output produce advertising and marketing and so forth.

The speaker made a thought-provoking philosophy of ‘INM’ where I for Innovation, N for Networking, and M for Marketing. He also accepted to the fact that ‘Network= Net Worth’ as it assists always in getting things done. He further explicated that an organization must have a purpose that drives them. The purpose should be very strong and the business should understand the pulse of an ecosystem. He put forward his own experiences and took us through the journey of KisanSaathi. He told, In India, there are 86% of small farmers have fragmented lands.

The challenge in the Agri industry he described was not many farmers are adopting the best Agri practices. Little or no use of machines is made in ploughing, sowing, irrigating, thinning and pruning, weeding, harvesting threshing, and transporting the crops.  Large tracts of fertile land are afflicted by soil erosion via wind and water.  Agricultural advertising nonetheless continues to be in bad form in rural India. Storage centres within the rural regions are either wholly absent or grossly insufficient. One major handicap of Indian agriculture is the lack of cheap and efficient transportation. 30% of the harvested crop is wasted in the farmers’ field itself, the next 30% are wasted during transportation and the remaining 40% are wasted in the warehouse. In brief, 1/3^rd of the food consumed is wasted.

Mr. Prem’s vision then became to bring effective change to the Agri-Business ecosystem, hence he created one by bringing small farmers into a group and made an industry-like format. He expounded on the methodicalness he has gone through by achieving farmers’ sustainability and gaining trust. He understood the need and improved the standard of living of the farmers. He even created a win-win situation for the farmers and the buyers across the value chain. He effectively addressed loopholes in the supply chain management system and now he’s one of the self-made booming entrepreneurs.

The session then came to its focal point when he posited the mantra of a true entrepreneur i.e. “Entrepreneur challenges the unknowns to become one of them”. According to him, having the right mentors and coaches at the early stage of the career assists to win success.