Six weeks into my new role as an iCat (Impact Catalyst) fellow with GreenOil in New Delhi, India and I think it is a good time to pen down some thoughts. For me it has been a long road from the intensely capitalistic world of high tech mobile marketing to working with a social enterprise like GreenOil, seeking to democratize power, in a nutshell. The idea of individual farmers being able to generate their own electricity from waste of their own farmlands, thus creating a sustainable and renewable microcosm of energy, is far removed from anything I have done before.
The challenges facing a four-year old startup like GreenOil are plenty. Generating positive revenue streams, fundraising for the next milestone while building up the power plant, all with scarce resources and a small team – it’s not easy! But it’s easy to get bogged down by the challenges and forget to smell the roses along the way. Yes, GreenOil has many things going for it. One of them is the organic compost that is created as a by-product of the electricity generation process. This compost, when enhanced by bacterial consortia, is manna for the soil and is currently being sold to farmers to help enhance soil nutrition and longevity, reduce spending on irrigation and chemical fertilizer, and improve crop productivity.
On meeting with the farmers of rural Rajasthan (the village of Samode to be specific) I am struck by the simplicity of life in rural India on the one hand, and the innate intelligence of the farmer as a consumer, on the other. Marketing to this intelligent consumer will therefore need a deep understanding of their problems, the specific products that will help them, and a means to help the farmer de-risk a product trial such that evaluation can satisfactorily happen without giving the farm away (pun intended).
In the end, for GreenOil and its CEO Anupam Jalote, the mission reigns supreme. Healing the earth by putting into it what we take out of it, nothing more and nothing less. Along the way, the company empowers farmers, and addresses the waste disposal problem with a solution that is elegant, simple, reproducible and scalable. I look forward to locking step with GreenOil in its journey forward this year.