Raj Kumar

Aardraa is a social business which works for hill village survival and its empowerment through sustainable agriculture by mobilising small and marginal landholding hill farmers to sell their organic crops as aardraa trustee at a fair price and thereby take ownership for their village development, unlike other developmental work. In the process, we generate dignified sustainable local jobs for the non-farmer trustee at our processing and packaging village centres. I initiated this project as a spin-off of "Second Step Development" Project vision to bring sustainable development in the Himalayan villages. As a result, I formulated an entire project draft and social business plan for fundraising and pitching. I was able to raise an initial seed-grant of INR 3,00,000 for pilot testing and execution of its related operational and fieldwork activities. I was able to design and implement the program by forming aardraa trust of hill farmers to procure crops transparently at a fair price. I was responsible to transport, store and process the crops at our village centres. I took the lead in marketing our packaged branded products at our own e-commerce website and other social media and physical channels. Also, monthly feed-back, performance assessment report and quarterly reviews were regularly presented to the core team of DBS-TISS incubation centre, Mumbai.