Water Of Plenty

Triton Foodworks aims to change the face of urban farming through hydroponics, which requires less space and water.

- Sayan Chakraborty

When Ullas Samrat and Dhruv Khanna spoke after a long hiatus in the summer of 2014, they had a lot to share. The childhood friends had drifted apart when Khanna relocated to Singapore for a master’s degree in 2013, while Samrat stayed back in Delhi to work in his family’s lighting business.

On that call, they mostly spoke about where their lives were headed. Samrat was figuring out a way to keep his mother, who suffered from a lung disorder, away from Delhi’s air pollution. His plan to shift his mother to a farmhouse on the outskirts was struck down by doctors—pesticides, soil and dust at the farms would do her no good. This got him thinking about farming without soil. Khanna, stationed in Singapore, was building his own startup, one that aspired to make TVs smart.

A few minutes into the conversation, both figured they wanted to do something more “meaningful and impactful in life”. Working on a sustainable farming module could be a good starting point, the friends agreed.

“When I told Dhruv about soilless farming, he called me back in three days and said there are a few startups in Singapore [like Comcrop] doing the same. Dhruv said he would be visiting India in a couple of months and if we could figure out a pilot by then, he could work on his startup from Delhi and relocate,” says Samrat, 28, in a phone interview.

Khanna, also 28, did return in September. By then, the duo had sold their dream to three others— Devanshu Shivnani, Deepak Kukreja and Vaibhav Batra. In October they set up Triton Foodworks and started out by growing strawberries hydroponically—without the use of soil, in a nutrient-rich medium using water as solvent—on a plot in Delhi’s Sainik Farms, where Samrat’s family owned some land. The yield was heartening—eight tonnes, which fetched them a profit of about ₹3.5 lakh.