When Vel Murugan, a farmer of Samudram village in Salem, heard four young management graduates giving a talk on the radio, it struck a direct chord
CHENNAI: When Vel Murugan, a farmer of Samudram village in Salem, heard four young management graduates giving a talk on the radio, it struck a direct chord. They were speaking on a great opportunity to turn `useless’ sheaths of areca trees into products with global demand.
A phone call to the radio station and a couple of meetings later, Murugan is part of a budding success story of rural entrepreneurship.
Sarvanan, Santosh Ramadoss, Deepak Bhatter and Anitha Parthasarathy, all graduates of the Bharatidasan Institute of Management (BIM), had formed a team called ProGreen to set up rural micro cooperatives. The project on environment-friendly areca plates and cups had won them first prize at the Global Social Entrepreneurship competition conducted by the University of Washington in Seattle.
Areca trees are grown for their nuts, while the sheaths usually go waste. “I heard them on the radio and I thought that this is something I can do”, says Murugan, who will soon be getting four machines from ProGreen to start manufacturing areca plates.
“These eco-friendly products have a big market worldwide and a unit can break even in a year”, says Bhatter.
According to the team’s plan, the farmer becomes a stake-holder of ProGreen, which would provide training in manufacturing and marketing. Profits are shared with farmers. “We wanted to help the farmers get bank loans for the project. Since the initial response from the banks was not good, we decided to put in Rs 80,000 (part of the prize money) to fund Murugan’s project”, says Ramadoss.
Murugan will provide land and labour. The four graduates, now well-placed in top companies, had also won the Microsoft-sponsored Imagine Cup 2005’s for their project on leveraging rural micro cooperatives for BPOs.
ProGreen is also working on a project to provide a global market for the traditional weavers of Bagalkot on the Karnataka-Maharashtra border. It has identified a woman — Drakshayani – who weaves the traditional Guledgud blouse material, as the nodal person.
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