Social Alpha targets to enroll 10 million farmers over next 3 years

Social Alpha, a multistage innovation curation and venture development platform, targets to reach 10 million farmers over the next three years through its lab-to-market platform, its founder Manoj Kumar has said.

Social Alpha, a platform for science and technology start-ups aiming to address critical social, economic and environmental challenges, supports start-ups to come up with climate-smart innovations that will help farmers, particularly smallholders.  

Kumar launched the unique organisation in 2016. It has Social Alpha labs where startups can use its infrastructure to come up with a product. It is more like an incubator that IIT Madras has. 

Once a product is ready, it is taken up by Social Alpha Ventures to farmers or markets to make it commercially viable. It then has Social Alpha communities, which is its downstream work. It functions with its team that is across the country in cities such as Bhubaneswar, Ranchi, Bengaluru, Delhi and Lucknow.

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Looking as a full stack

In addition, Social Alpha has a large network of partners and  non-governmental organisations. All these have helped the organisation to enroll farmers in various parts of the country.  

“From 2016, cumulatively we have roped in five lakh farmers across the country. For the next three years, our target is a very ambitious 10 million farmers. But from half a million, it is possible to reach to 10 million if we can continue to find good startups and continue to support them,” said Kumar.

Having realised that neither investors nor NGOs were looking at the agriculture sector as a full stack, Social Alpha, which has been incorporated as a not-for-profit organisation, decided to go in for a “seamless transition of innovation from research to deployment”.  It helps to be a not-for-profit organisation as it can raise capital through philanthropy and corporate social responsibility to be deployed for the startups.

“To build this ecosystem, we started working with incubators, investors and NGOs.  The idea of starting Social Alpha was that while we have a lot of work happening in development, can we bring a little more innovation so that we can solve some of our complex problems in a sustainable and scalable way,” said Kumar. 

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Helping get funds

With over 80 per cent of the farmers being smallholders, Social Alpha encourages startups to design equipment for them that can be used in the production process, increase soil life of the produce, improve soil regeneration, retain more water and reduce post-harvest losses through cold storage.  

The organisation helps start-ups get funds through grants or market access, he said.  

Social Alpha has initiated over 50 startups in the agriculture sector such as Satyukt Analytics, New Leaf Dyanmics, Khethworks, Urdhvam, Occipital and Mivipro.   

On the changes these startups have brought among smallholders, Kumar said one of them has created a 0.3 GP small lightweight irrigation solar pump that can be used in places where the water table is not deep. The cost is low and it helps save on diesel.

There is another firm which produces EF polymer that increases water retention when added to the soil. Similarly, Social Alpha has helped a firm that has built a cold storage run with biomass. 

UP farmers gain the most

These startups are based in various places across the country but the implementation of pilots of these inventions is done in places of donors’ or funders’ interest. 

“For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded in a project in UP and Odisha. Then, Tata Trust funded in Jharkhand. Cisco funded our programme pan-national,” said the Social Alpha founder.  

The maximum of farmers who have benefited from the organisation’s efforts are from Uttar Pradesh, followed by Odisha, Karnataka and Maharashtra.

 One of the major problems that farmers face is that banks do not finance climate-smart technologies and Social Alpha is working on finding a solution. It is also trying to improve the women’s lot as 95 per cent of smallholding farms are managed by women. 

The organisation’s efforts have helped increase farmers’ income by 20-80 per cent, said Kumar.