4-DeHaat-One Stop Solutions

Transcript

Hello friends. Today, we want to share a case study with you that provides 360 degrees one stop solutions to farmers. They provide every kind of input and information to the farmers from seeds to anything in the market. This is a Bihar based startup called DeHaat and it was started by a group of 5 people. They provide all kinds of services to farmers. As part of the SRSFI project, we requested them in 2015 to start working on conservation agriculture in Purnea district. We will look at how they started and developed a sustainable model and established a business on conservation agriculture.

First, they have a mobile app through which we can order any inputs and get them delivered to our home. We can also sell our output through it. But there are difficulties as many farmers are difficult to connect as they are not very ICT literate. To overcome this problem, DeHaat made micro entrepreneurs or DeHaat coordinators at village level and they started working as nodal officers with whom the contract farmers would work. So if any farmer needs any input then they will contact the micro entrepreneurs and get the needed things.

Now like I said earlier, a problem in conservation agriculture we face is that of machines. So DeHaat bought a lot of machines like laser land leveler, zero tillage machine or small harvesting machines or rain guns. They bought these machines and organized demonstrations among farmers and started to work as service providers.

Many times as part of our project, we would need machines like we did land levelling of many farmers as part of the project. So we provided the contract of doing such things to DeHaat and this helped them grow their business. They did very well in marketing maize crop and they established a network with farmers. In addition, they also started providing information through sms or call centre. These days they also provide credit to farmers. They started providing information and services about how much fertilizer and what quality is required for soil testing and about insecticide and pesticides.

BAU also started providing technical backstopping about conservation agriculture to them and other people from the project also started working with them. They were able to set up a sustainable private business institution in Purnea. Today, farmers are able to get services in a timely manner and DeHaat is able to profit from such activities as they now have a network setup.

There are three main things behind the success of DeHaat and how the business model turned out to be a successful sustainable model. First, it works on an end to end one stop approach. If anyone wants to buy inputs, then they can do that through DeHaat or if anybody wants to sell their output then they can also do that through DeHaat. Earlier, vendors were into malpractice like cheating while weighing output so they used electronic weighing machines or cheating farmers in the name of moisture. Also, many times farmers would give their output to vendors and then they had to wait for their money for like 3 to 6 months. In worst case scenarios, the  vendors would run away. So farmers would incur a big loss because of these things. But DeHaat, provided an assured medium to sell output and would promise payments within a week. So in this way, DeHaat did very well in output marketing.

The second success point after the end to end approach is the flow of information. We are wrong to think that a technology will scale out just by providing machines, seeds or quality inputs. We have to also provide the protocol or information related to the technology to the farmers. So DeHaat collaborated with BAU to work on this information flow.

The third success point is relationship building. They formed a relationship and network with the farmers and made them a contract farmer and micro entrepreneurs. So these three points of end to end approach, flow of information and relationship building helped DeHaat become a successful business model.

So friends, there is a lot of work that young entrepreneurs can do in this value chain. Farmers can also benefit from this and at the same time also set up a successful business model.