EP 38 – One Wrong Decision Could Push Them Back to Poverty – Anil Kumar – Founder and CEO at Samunnati

India GameChanger spent an amazing time with Anil Kumar, the Founder and CEO of Samunnati. Samunnati is an open agri network built to unlock the trillion-dollar-plus potential of India’s agricultural sector with smallholder farmers at its center.

Some of the topics Anil covered:

• His 27 years of experience in the rural agricultural sector
• The resilience of rural-agri communities in spite of being ignored by formal financial institutions
• The challenges smallholder farmers face accessing large selling markets
• The pitfalls of a highly fragmented agri-ecosystem
• The level of financial sophistication of most smallholder farmers is quite high
• It is not about financial literacy, it is about product customization

Other titles we considered for this episode, but ultimately decided ‘maybe next time’:

1. Buying Inputs Retail and Selling Wholesale
2. Harmonizing the Journey
3. They Are More Sophisticated than You and Me
4. Leveraging the Power of Aggregation
5. We Require the Zubin Mehta’s of Agriculture