India’s agriculture sector is navigating a complex landscape marked by climate uncertainty, resource scarcity, labor shortages, and the growing need for sustainable rural livelihoods. Amid these challenges, innovative grassroots solutions are emerging that combine technology, circular economy principles, and community empowerment to create lasting impact.
In this exclusive interaction with TheCSRUniverse, Mr. Amitkumar Naphade, CEO of Krushi Vikas Va Gramin Prashikshan Sanstha and recipient of the Acumen Angel Award 2025, shares how his organisation is transforming agricultural waste into valuable livestock feed, strengthening Farmer-Producer Organisations, promoting women-led drone services, and advancing climate-smart farming practices. He also discusses the role of patient capital in social innovation, the opportunities and challenges of introducing emerging technologies such as AI in rural communities, and the importance of building resilient agricultural ecosystems that benefit farmers, livestock owners, and the environment alike.
Read the full interview:
Q. Congratulations on being selected for the Acumen Angel Award. What does this recognition mean for you and for the farming communities you work with?
A. Being selected for the Acumen Angel Award is a tremendous honour and a strong source of motivation for us and the farming communities we work with. This recognition validates the innovative circular economy model we have been developing, one that addresses multiple interconnected challenges in agriculture, livestock, and the environment. In many ways, this is a pioneering approach that is not yet widely seen elsewhere in the world.
Our work focuses on transforming cotton stalk waste into a valuable resource. Every year, nearly 25 million tons of cotton stalks go unused, and farmers are forced to pay to have them removed. In many cases, these stalks are burned, leading to environmental degradation, air pollution, and loss of valuable biomass. Through our model, we are converting this agricultural waste into complete livestock feed and organic soil-enriching solutions, creating a sustainable circular economy structure.
At the same time, the model contributes to carbon sequestration and improves soil organic carbon, ultimately leading to healthier, more fertile soil. This has long-term benefits for agricultural productivity, climate resilience, and sustainable farming systems.
For farming communities, the impact is significant. Farmers can reduce the financial burden of cotton stalk removal while also benefiting from improved soil health and enhanced productivity. Livestock farmers gain access to affordable, nutritious, complete feed, helping to address the growing challenge of fodder scarcity.
This model is especially promising for goat farming where feed availability and cost are major concerns. By ensuring a sustainable feed source, the initiative can make goat farming more economical, resilient, and profitable for rural households. The model is also highly useful for dairy farmers whose cows produce an average of 10 litres of milk per day, as it provides a cost-effective, nutritionally balanced feed option that supports productivity while reducing feed costs.
Most importantly, the Acumen Angel Award provides visibility and credibility to this model. It creates an opportunity for this impactful story to reach different states and countries, enabling replication and scaling of the approach to achieve greater social and environmental impact.
Q. How will this global recognition help expand the impact of the Krushi Vikas Va Gramin Prashikshan Sanstha going forward?
A. As I mentioned earlier, this global recognition will help the initiative undertaken by Krushi Vikas Va Gramin Prashikshan Sanstha reach a much wider audience, including innovators, institutions, farming communities, and policymakers across different countries.
At Krushi Vikas, we strongly believe that if a model proves successful and has a positive impact, it should not remain limited to a single geography or organisation. Our approach has always been collaborative and open. Therefore, anyone who wants to replicate this circular economy model will receive hand-holding support from us. We are committed to sharing our lessons learned, technical knowledge, implementation strategies, and practical experience.
While establishing this model, we faced several challenges—technical, operational, financial, and social. These experiences have given us valuable insights. By sharing these lessons with others, we can help new initiatives avoid similar difficulties and establish stronger, more effective models in less time.
This recognition is especially important because it gives credibility and global visibility to the work being done by Krushi Vikas. Once people understand the environmental, economic, and social value of this initiative, it can inspire wider adoption and partnerships. The recognition can help the model expand beyond the regions where we currently work and encourage replication in other cotton-growing areas across India and globally.
Ultimately, our vision is not only to solve the problem of cotton stalk waste but also to create a scalable and sustainable rural development model that strengthens farmer livelihoods, supports livestock farming, improves soil health, and contributes to climate action at a larger scale.
Q. Acumen Academy is known for its “patient capital” approach. How has this long-term thinking helped you scale your work differently from traditional funding models?
A. The “patient capital” approach of Acumen Academy is extremely important for innovation-driven social enterprises like ours. In many traditional funding models, the ability to take risks is limited, and there is often an expectation of immediate results or returns within a short period—sometimes in just one or two years.
However, innovative rural development and climate-resilient agriculture models require time to evolve. Such initiatives go through multiple stages of experimentation, learning, adaptation, and community acceptance before the real impact becomes visible. There is always uncertainty and risk involved in building something new.
What makes Acumen’s approach different is the understanding that meaningful social innovation cannot always deliver quick outcomes. When support comes with patience and trust, it reduces pressure on the organisation and allows the founding team to focus on strengthening and refining the model instead of worrying about short-term returns.
Another important aspect is that this support comes as a grant, which removes the immediate pressure of repayment. That creates the space to think more freely, innovate responsibly, and focus on building a sustainable long-term solution rather than chasing short-term financial targets.
For the team at Krushi Vikas Va Gramin Prashikshan Sanstha, this approach has been very empowering. It has enabled us to experiment, learn from challenges, and take bold steps toward building a scalable circular economy model that addresses agricultural waste, livestock feed scarcity, soil health, and climate resilience in an integrated way.
Q. Can you explain the “Drone Didi” initiative in simple terms and how it is changing farming practices on the ground?
A. The “Drone Didi” initiative is a very important and supportive intervention for the changing realities of agriculture. With climate change, rising temperatures, increasing labour shortages, and the growing need for efficient farming practices, drone-based spraying is becoming a necessity rather than just an innovation. Under this initiative, rural women, known as Drone Didis, are trained to operate agricultural drones and provide spraying services to farmers.
This initiative is bringing multiple benefits at the ground level. First, drone spraying allows farmers to complete spraying operations in a much shorter time and with greater precision. Timely spraying is extremely important in agriculture because delays can directly affect crop health and productivity. Since drones can cover large areas quickly, farmers can carry out spraying at the right stage, ultimately improving farm productivity.
Another major advantage is water conservation. Compared with traditional spraying methods, drone spraying can reduce water use by 70–80%. This is especially significant for drought-prone and water-stressed regions, where every drop of water matters.
The initiative is also addressing the growing labour shortage in rural areas. Today, many farmers struggle to find labourers for spraying work, especially during peak agricultural seasons. Drone technology reduces dependence on manual labour while also making the process faster and more efficient.
In addition, rising heat is making manual spraying a very difficult and risky activity for farm workers. Traditional spraying often exposes farmers and labourers to harmful chemicals, and improper handling can lead to poisoning and serious health risks. With drones, direct exposure to chemicals is greatly reduced, making spraying much safer.
Drones are now also being used to spray liquid fertilisers and other agricultural inputs, further improving efficiency and precision in farming practices.
Overall, the Drone Didi initiative is not only modernising agriculture but also creating rural livelihood opportunities for women, promoting climate-smart farming, reducing drudgery, conserving water, and helping farmers adopt safer and more efficient agricultural practices.
Q. What social and technical challenges do you face when introducing tools like drones to women in rural farming communities?
A. The work we are doing is focused on strengthening the Drone Didi initiative because we observed several practical gaps that were limiting the success and long-term sustainability of the scheme.
One of the biggest challenges was related to training. While many women received basic drone-operation training, the realities on the ground required a much more practical, service-oriented approach. These women are working in remote rural areas across the country, where technical support is often not readily available. Therefore, they need hands-on technical knowledge so that if a problem occurs with the drone, they can identify the issue themselves, carry out basic troubleshooting, or even replace small parts when necessary.
Another important challenge is operational safety and confidence. Since Drone Didi handles agricultural chemicals and flies drones in real farming conditions, practical, field-based training is extremely important. In some cases, this level of practical exposure was missing.
Transportation also became a challenge. Many Drone Didi’s lacked suitable vehicles to transport drones and equipment between villages or farms, which affected service delivery and mobility.
We also realized that the model cannot function effectively with only one trained operator. A co-pilot or support person is equally important for smooth operations, field coordination, chemical handling, and safety. However, this aspect was not adequately incorporated into the program's original design. We therefore started focusing on training support teams along with the Drone Didi’s.
Another major challenge was financial sustainability. Purchasing and operating drones requires investment, and for that, access to finance is essential. However, banks and financial institutions often require a strong, bankable business proposal before providing support. Convincing them that drone-based agricultural services can become a viable rural enterprise was itself a challenge. Along with this, Drone Didi’s also needed training in business planning, service pricing, revenue generation, and operational economics so they could run the initiative as a sustainable enterprise.
On the social side, farmer awareness is still limited in many areas. Many farmers are not yet fully aware of the effectiveness, safety, water-saving potential, and efficiency of drone spraying because enough demonstrations and field-level awareness activities have not taken place. Building trust among farmers is, therefore, equally important.
So overall, the challenges are not only technical but also social, financial, logistical, and institutional. We studied these gaps carefully and are now working to build a more practical, community-based, and sustainable support system that can help the Drone Didi initiative succeed at scale.
Q. How does your model of converting agricultural residue into livestock feed work, and how does it address both farm waste and fodder shortage?
A. Our model is based on converting agricultural residue, particularly cotton stalk waste, into nutritious livestock feed through an innovative circular economy approach. We are developing and implementing this model with technical support from institutions such as the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay and the Maharashtra Animal and Fishery Sciences University.
Every year, more than 25 million tons of cotton stalk waste is generated, and a large portion of it is burned in fields. This not only causes environmental degradation and air pollution but also imposes an additional financial burden on farmers, who must spend money to remove the stalks from their farms.
While exploring solutions to this challenge, our partner organisations developed a scientific process to measure the feed formulation by which cotton stalk residue can be converted into complete livestock feed. This approach transforms what was previously considered waste into a valuable resource.
The results have been very encouraging, especially in dairy animals and goats. In goat farming, particularly in stall-fed rearing systems, we have observed a 30–35% improvement in weight gain. The model is helping livestock farmers by reducing mortality, improving reproductive health, and enhancing overall animal productivity.
The feed has also shown promising results in dairy farming, especially for cows with an average daily milk yield of around 10 litres. It helps improve milk yield, animal health, and milk fat content while providing a more affordable and nutritionally balanced feeding option for small and marginal farmers. By reducing dependence on expensive conventional fodder, the model supports more sustainable and economically viable dairy farming practices.
At the same time, the model directly addresses the growing fodder shortage problem. Earlier, cotton stalks were largely treated as unusable waste and were not considered part of the fodder economy. By converting them into complete feed, we are creating an additional source of dry fodder. If we consider Maharashtra alone, the fodder shortage is estimated at around 14 million tons, and many other states also face significant dry fodder deficits. This model can play an important role in reducing that gap.
Beyond livestock feed, we are also building a larger circular economy framework around the model. We are exploring the integration of cow dung, biogas, slurry management, and soil enrichment systems so that nutrients return back to the soil. This contributes to improved soil organic carbon, carbon sequestration, and long-term soil health.
So, in a single integrated model, we are addressing multiple challenges simultaneously: agricultural waste management, fodder scarcity, livestock productivity, farmer income, soil enrichment, and climate resilience.
Q. Based on your experience, what are the key factors that help a Farmer-Producer Organisation grow from a local group into a strong and competitive enterprise?
A. Based on our experience at Krushi Vikas Va Gramin Prashikshan Sanstha, the growth of a Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO) from a small local group into a strong and competitive enterprise depends on several interconnected factors.
Our own journey began with promoting and facilitating Farmer-Producer Companies at the grassroots level. Over time, we developed model FPOs and later launched the “All About FPO” initiative, through which thousands of ecosystem stakeholders across 11–12 states received capacity building support, mentoring, and practical guidance.
The first and most important factor is orientation and clarity among farmers. When an FPO is formed, members must clearly understand that it is a business enterprise they own. In many cases, farmers join with misconceptions or expectations shaped by traditional cooperative or subsidy-driven approaches. Removing these myths and creating a sense of ownership is extremely important.
The second key factor is transparency and good governance. There must be transparency between the board and shareholders, along with clear communication and accountability among the board members itself. Strong governance builds trust, and trust is the foundation for long-term growth.
Another major factor is developing business understanding and decision-making ability. Since many FPO board members are first-generation entrepreneurs, they need continuous support to understand business planning, market dynamics, pricing, financial management, and risk-taking. The willingness to keep learning is therefore extremely important. If the board members and management team continue to build their capacities, they can run the FPO much more effectively and competitively.
Networking is also critical for success. An FPO cannot grow in isolation. Strong linkages with buyers, sellers, government departments, financial institutions, technical agencies, Krishi Vigyan Kendras, agricultural universities, and market players are essential for scaling operations and accessing opportunities.
One challenge we often observe is that board members are hesitant or fearful about taking loans for business expansion. Many rural communities have limited access to enterprise financing, and convincing them that responsible borrowing can help scale operations and generate greater benefits for farmers is very important. Building confidence around financial planning and creating bankable business models is, therefore, a key step in strengthening FPOs.
At the same time, legal and statutory compliance are equally important. Many FPOs neglect compliance-related processes in the early stages, which later creates operational and financial difficulties. Proper accounting, audits, governance systems, and compliance management are necessary for building credibility and long-term sustainability.
Ultimately, a successful Farmer Producer Company grows not only through financial investment, but through trust, transparency, continuous learning, professional management, strong networks, and the confidence to think and operate like a true farmer-owned enterprise.
Q. How are tools like automatic weather stations and precision agriculture helping farmers deal with climate risks?
A. If we look at the changing weather patterns and the growing impact of climate change, it has become essential for agriculture to move toward precision farming and the use of climate-smart technologies.
Tools such as automatic weather stations and precision agriculture systems help farmers make better and more informed decisions based on real-time data. These technologies collect information related to soil moisture, temperature, humidity, wind flow, rainfall patterns, and overall atmospheric conditions. Through sensors, satellites, and digital platforms, this data is analysed and converted into practical advisories for farmers.
For example, farmers can receive early alerts about possible pest attacks, disease outbreaks, rainfall, storms, or sudden weather changes. They can also determine whether soil moisture is already sufficient or whether irrigation is needed. This helps farmers avoid unnecessary irrigation and use water more efficiently.
Similarly, precision agriculture tools can guide farmers on spraying practices, such as when spraying is required, which type of input to use, and how much is necessary. This reduces excessive use of pesticides and fertilisers, lowers production costs, and minimizes environmental impact.
These tools are especially important in the context of climate risks because timely and accurate information helps farmers take preventive action rather than react after damage has already occurred. As a result, farming risks are reduced, input costs are optimized, productivity improves, and the quality of produce becomes better.
In this way, automatic weather stations and precision agriculture technologies are helping farmers move from traditional, guess-based farming toward data-driven, climate-resilient agriculture.
Q. What are the biggest gaps in India’s rural development ecosystem today, and how can emerging technologies like AI remain accessible to small and marginal farmers?
A. If we look at India’s rural development ecosystem today, the challenges are extremely large and complex. India has nearly 6.5 lakh villages, and a significant number of them face serious climate-related vulnerabilities. Nearly 3 lakh villages experience some form of drought or water stress, while around 25–30% of agricultural land is facing degradation or declining soil health. Along with this, farmers are facing rising input costs, labour shortages, unpredictable weather patterns, fragmented landholdings, and limited access to markets, technology, and institutional support.
At the same time, more than 80% of India’s farmers are small and marginal farmers. So the real question is not whether advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence can transform agriculture, but whether these technologies can be accessible, affordable, and understandable to the farmers who need them most.
One positive change is that smartphones have already reached a large number of rural households. This has created the first digital bridge. Farmers are now more connected than before and are gradually becoming familiar with digital tools and AI-driven platforms. However, access to technology alone is not enough. The real gap is digital capacity and practical understanding.
A few years ago, Krushi Vikas Va Gramin Prashikshan Sanstha implemented digital literacy initiatives to help rural communities learn how to use smartphones and digital services effectively. Now, the next phase is much more important—building awareness and capacity around emerging technologies such as AI, precision agriculture, remote sensing, and data-driven advisory systems.
Farmers need practical training on how these technologies can help them in day-to-day farming decisions. For example, AI can support farmers through weather forecasting, pest and disease prediction, irrigation planning, crop advisory services, market intelligence, and input optimization. In precision agriculture, AI can process large amounts of weather, soil, satellite, and crop data in real time—something an individual farmer could not do alone.
This becomes even more important in the context of climate change and labour shortages. Farmers today need faster, more accurate, and localised decision-making support. AI-driven systems can help reduce risks, lower input costs, improve productivity, and increase resilience against climate shocks.
However, for AI to truly benefit rural India, technology must remain simple, local-language based, affordable, and community-oriented. Farmer Producer Companies, grassroots institutions, extension systems, and rural youth can play an important role in bridging this gap between technology and farmers.
Ultimately, technology should not replace farmers—it should strengthen their decision-making ability. If emerging technologies are combined with proper training, local support systems, and inclusive access, they can become powerful tools for empowering small and marginal farmers and building a more climate-resilient rural economy.
Q. Does Krushi Vikas plan to list on SSE? What will be the project?
A. Krushi Vikas reached an important milestone by registering on the Social Stock Exchange (SSE) with BSE in FY 2025–26. In the current financial year, the organisation plans to launch its first SSE issue to establish 500 biogas units across rural Maharashtra, with an initial focus on the Vidarbha region.
The initiative aims to address rural energy needs through a clean and decentralized renewable energy solution while creating additional agricultural benefits for farmers. Beyond providing sustainable cooking and energy access, the project promotes a circular rural economy by converting livestock and organic waste into biogas, with the nutrient-rich slurry being reused to improve soil health and reduce dependence on chemical fertilisers.
The focus on Vidarbha is intentional, given the region’s agrarian distress, rising input costs, and climate vulnerability. Krushi Vikas sees this project as more than an energy intervention—it is a rural resilience model that combines renewable energy, sustainable agriculture, and improved farm economics.
As its first SSE issue, the initiative also reflects a shift toward more transparent, outcomes-driven social financing. If successful, the model has the potential to be scaled across other climate-vulnerable regions of rural India.
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