Life should give one enough chances to exhibit one’s skills. Most opportunities that make a person self-confident would be the ones in school.
Gaurav and Abhishek Sharma from MISB Bocconi, a management school in Noida, have been able to prove their skills in an international competition which was organised by The Barilla Good4. Barilla is the biggest pasta manufacturing company in the world. The competition consisted of two rounds for three separate categories - ‘Good for Planet’, ‘Good for Communities’ and ‘Good for Well-being’.
Gaurav and Abhishek both 25 years of age are a part of the 2015 batch of the Post Graduate Program in Business. Abhishek’s specialisation courses are Finance and
Strategy, while Gaurav has specialised in Marketing and Operations.
Sashaktiran – the team in which Gaurav and Abhishek are partners, promises to resolve three huge problems in Indian agriculture: indebtedness, lack of education
and wastage.
“We have close to 210 million farmers in the country who earn less than Euros 0.3 per day. A farmer is forced to take loans from private parties and made to pay high interest rates which in itself is very hard for him to do as he gets a very small part of the crop that he produces. So, this is like a vicious circle that he stays trapped into and many times, these farmers end their lives. This economical problem is accentuated by the fact that he is mostly uneducated, hardly knows much about the amount of chemicals he should use to get the best out of the piece of land he has, doesn’t know much about the government policies that are there for their help,” Abhishek tells Metrolife.
“Just three weeks back I read an article in a newspaper that says that among the families of the farmers who commit suicide in India, almost 50 per cent of them never get the benefits of the government policies because they are not aware of it,” adds Gaurav.
Gaurav says, “Almost 45 per cent of the produce gets wasted before it reaches the end consumers and the reasons are poor storage and transport facilities. Usage of jute sacks for storage which can be torn or eaten up by rodents lead to a lot of wastage of these grains. We waste around 210 million tonnes of wheat which, if stopped, can feed more than 100 million out of the 750 million malnourished people around the world. Without doing anything about productivity or new methods of farming, just by being careful we can make such a huge difference,” he informs.
“So by cutting down the value chain and transporting the wheat grains directly from the farmers to the small retailers in silo trucks, we have tried to address these problems,” says Gaurav.
During their stint in Milan at Bocconi for a semester, the enterprising duo came to know about the competition, in which their professors and peers also participated.
Gaurav and Abhishek plan to start their company with the help of mentorship from Speed Mi Up, an Italian organisation that explores opportunities for start-ups such
as these.
“Since Barilla works in the food sector, that was the theme of the competition. One of the judges was a member of the World Health Organisation,” says Abhishek. The competition takes place every year starting in mid-April and the deadline is usually around mid-October. In a competition like this one, where there were more than 250 teams from the world’s Top B-Schools, including colleges from North America, South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, who had submitted their business ideas, and from which only two teams had to be selected, expecting to come out as winners was a distant dream for the two youngsters. Delighted at having notched success at an international arena, the youngsters hope that the top honour will open newer and bigger avenues for them.
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