Lay Of The Land

Agriculture might be the biggest source of livelihood in India, but farmers remain the last to reap decent profits. Rikin Gandhi and Aditya Sethi, founders of Digital Green, want to change that.

- Kerry Harwin

Meeting Rikin Gandhi, 36, and Aditya Sethi, 31, it would be easy to make false assumptions about their field of interest. Yes, Rikin’s polar fleeces emblazoned with tech company logos – an aesthetic that recalls an Indian-American version of Silicon Valley’s Richard Hendricks – do hint at his MIT degree and San Francisco address. And Aditya’s wire-framed spectacles and sweater vest over bulging biceps aren’t far off from his global investment banking background.

But one would be much more likely to imagine the pair at home at TechCrunch Disrupt than standing in a dusty sabzi mandi in Bihar’s Samastipur district, observing as vegetables grown by dozens of farmers are logged into a smartphone app – a process that will trigger digital payments to each farmer.

Despite appearances, the duo are in the business of changing the way that farmers in some of India’s poorest states grow and sell their crops.

“I’ve always been very mission-oriented,” Gandhi tells me, slightly sheepishly. Having received a shockingly immediate reply after sending the man a 4am email, I’ve just asked if he was this much of a rock star performer even in his childhood.

In 2006, Gandhi successfully founded Digital Green, an NGO that boosts farmer incomes through education. And while he’s grown it into multimillion-dollar budgets (from international donor support) and operations on three continents, with a reach of nearly two million farmers, Gandhi’s response to my query is characteristically modest. “Growing up,” he says, in suburban New Jersey, “I wanted to be an astronaut. So I put together a playbook to achieve it.”