Since September, the last time I wrote about the Navachetana
Dairy Initiative (NDI) for this blog, many challenges have been encountered and
much progress has been made. Five months ago the NDI team (of which I am
the convener) was still deep in its field research phase, having just started
off its farmer-level interviews and surveys. In the weeks and months that
followed, the team also traveled to several nearby towns to speak with
employees of various local dairies, milk distributors, milk agents, and milk
retailers. Customer surveys in several towns were also conducted.
In all cases, the team documented the information gathered and then analyzed
how the data affected our social enterprise plans. These analyses
directly influenced the way we designed the enterprise, from farmer payment
systems to milk marketing strategies.
In the final months of 2009, the NDI team completed its business
plan for Amrut Dairy and Food Products Private Limited, the for-profit entity
of NDI that is responsible for procuring, processing and marketing farmers’
milk. Since early January we have sent out this business plan to
interested banks and other lending organizations/venture capitalists.
Slowly but surely, loans and equity are beginning to roll in!
In January the team received formal legal approval to use ‘Amrut
Dairy and Food Products Private Limited’ as the name for its dairy
company. This was the result of a bureaucratic process that involved
drafting the Memorandum of Articles and Articles of Association (which I
completed in October 2009) for the company and then keeping our fingers crossed
that the processing time would not take too long. (Only three months – at
this point, my opinion is that that’s pretty good!) Another major
bureaucratic process the NDI team remains embroiled in is converting the land
we have selected as the site for the Amrut dairy processing plant from
‘Agricultural’ to ‘Non-Agricultural’ so that we can legally use the land for
milk processing.
In the final months of 2009 the NDI team also sat together and
hammered out, detail by detail, a dairy development program (which is also an
entity of the overall dairy initiative). This program will provide local
farmers with a comprehensive set of high-quality dairy development services and
create an environment for paravets-as-entrepreneurs; this program is also
designed to be 50% financially sustainable during its first year of operations
and be fully financially sustainable by the third year of operations. The
proposal and budget for this dairy development program have been sent to a few
grant-making organizations (including Deshpande Foundation), and we have
received some encouraging responses.
At the current time the NDI team is focused on two main
priorities: acquiring the financial capital necessary to get NDI off the
ground, and expanding our team to ensure we have the human capital necessary to
translate the awesome ideas and plans we have on paper into tangible
success. Over the last few weeks we have formally hired one dairy
development officer (a high-level position in our proposed dairy development
program) and have short-listed candidates for the position of a second dairy
development officer. The NDI team is also heavily recruiting candidates
for the post of CEO of Amrut Dairy. (Know someone suitable for the
position? Please contact me for a complete job description and
application information!) So far a few candidates have been short-listed
for this position, and we will be holding our first round of interviews this
week.
I’ve kept this post about my main project at Navachetana, but
I’ll just quickly mention one of my side projects – completely redesigning the
Navachetana website and writing up all new content. Look out for our new website
later this month.
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