Khedut Samriddhi

Industry: Agriculture/Agribusiness
Headquarters: Gandhinagar, Gujarat
Website: www.khedut-samriddhi.com
Cohort: 2021

Based in Tapi, Gujarat, Khedut Samriddhi (‘khedut’ is the Gujarati word for farmer, while ‘samriddhi’ translates to prosperity) partners with Adivasi farmers by forming village-level production units and focuses on enabling production and sale of vermicompost to farmers as well as urban kitchen gardeners. As the quality of the soil is deteriorating due to excessive use of chemical fertilizers, they realized that there is a need for affordable organic fertilizers. Khedut Samriddhi is a social enterprise that believes sustainability, profitability, and social impact can go hand in hand. The business has so far sold good quality vermicompost to over 150 farmers and over 50 kitchen gardeners while also providing direct and indirect employment to Adivasi farmers from its two village-level units.

About the EntrepreneurS

Upaya Entrepreneur Bios

Namrata Acharya

CO-FOUNDER

Namrata Acharya is a social entrepreneur, originally from Delhi but currently based in Vyara, Gujarat. After completing her BA and Master’s in Economics from Delhi, she worked for a while at Oxford University Press as an editor in the economics list. Yearning to study further and break free from her largely sedentary work, she did her MPhil in Development Practice from Ambedkar University, Delhi, where she closely worked with the Adivasi farmers of Jharkhand. Interested in continuing her work with rural farmers, she briefly worked in the development sector. In order to create a greater social impact, she took part in the Social Startup Leadership Programme at AUD’s Incubation Centre before forming her own enterprise Khedut Samriddhi, in which she manages fieldwork, finances, and fundraising work.

Ankur Chaudhari

CO-FOUNDER

Ankur is a social entrepreneur based in Tapi, Gujarat. After completing his BTech in Agriculture from Junagarh Agricultural University, he worked for two drip irrigation companies. He then worked for two-and-a-half years as the technical and marketing coordinator for an all-women farmers’ cooperative, managing the marketing and sale of products sold by the cooperative. He came up with the idea of starting an enterprise that would specialize in producing organic compost starting with vermicompost when he saw that there was a rising demand for affordable organic compost, but not enough supply in the region. He went on to form Khedut Samriddhi in February 2019. He currently handles fieldwork, product development, marketing, and sales of the company and likes to delegate ‘boring’ work that has anything related to writing to his co-founder.