Aditya Agarwalla- Co-Founder of Kisan Network
Kisan Marketplace is an online marketplace connected to farmers in India through a mobile phone app. The farmers use the app to sell their crops to buyers. This system generally makes things cheaper for both the farmers and the buyers, because it cuts out the middlemen and geography which limits them in India.
This business is unique due to the new rise of cheap smartphones in India. Until recently, smartphones were not commonly available to people in India. But with this recent rise, has come a great opportunity to use technology to help the farmers more efficiently deliver their crops to sellers. Aditya Agarwalla 22, dropped out of Princeton University to start this business with his father, a farmer in India. They have a simple app, which farmers download onto their smartphones, and it connects them with a vast marketplace of buyers, with Kisan Network acting as the middleman connecting the two.
Aditya Agarwalla saw a need to sell crops more efficiently for farmers. He tapped into the technology, which at that point was a relatively unexploited field. As the first innovators in this market, the Kisan Network’s success has been remarkable. They have moved over one million pounds of crops in under one year.
It seems like a large factor of Kisan’s success was that they tapped into technology, “which at that point was a relatively unexploited field.” Where are the unexploited fields now that we could tap into, I wonder? If we could be the first to find an area that needs to be improved upon, and create something that assisted that area, would we be able to see success like Agarwalla has with Kisan?
That’s a great way to integrate technology and farming. Many people see that rural area populations are decreasing due to jobs found in cities. This is a great way to capitalize on a farmer’s product and to deliver goods to market. However, the idea would cut out middlemen and jobs would be lost. Where do you think these people would find jobs?