Driven by a visionary idea, Arun Nagpal, along with three other colleagues cofounded Mrida. The company has successfully established the concept of “Business of Development”.

In villages Faridapur Inayat Khan and Tahtajpur, district Bareilly – UP, Mrida has enabled women to learn the basics of stitching and guided the enterprising ones amongst them to progressively move up the value chain thereafter. Many of them have turned entrepreneurs by setting up their own stitching centres, creating in the process, an opportunity for sustainable livelihoods and financial independence.

Mrida creates market linkages that ensure recurring orders for the stitching centres. These orders not only create additional income opportunities but also expose the women to demanding urban customer requirements.

Excerpts from an interview with Nagpal:

Q How did Mrida come about?

Mrida (Sanskrit term for soil) was born out of an idea to make a difference. What my co-founders and I desired was to create an organisation that was socially and environmentally relevant, something that would impact the lives of underserved individuals and communities at the bottom of the pyramid in remote rural areas in India, and something that would create win-win situations across the value chain.

We also believed that a holistic approach would be a key factor of success, from the point of way of sustainability as well as scalability of any initiative that we undertook. Given that India is an agrarian economy, a logical starting point was to work with small and marginal farmers. Baseline studies revealed that the main impediment to their development was the lack of market linkages for their produce.

A business model evolved around encouraging them to cultivate healthy crops which could be value-added, processed and then marketed by Mrida and sold directly to end consumers. This ensured remunerative prices to farmers for their output, quality, and healthy products to B2B as well as B2C customers, and a viable business model for Mrida.

Q What kind of projects does Mrida initiate towards the development of the backward class?

We work towards solutions that are sustainable and can be scaled up and replicated. We start with baseline surveys and a need-assessment exercise to identify entry points that can help us build a base and credibility with the rural communities whom we would like to impact. These include energy access, agri-interventions, health, skill development, women’s empowerment initiatives, and so on.

Though individually small interventions, to begin with, they have the potential to become major development triggers over time. Mrida, as an integrator and a catalyst, then uses these triggers to facilitate community engagement, local leadership development, education, entrepreneurship, sustainable livelihoods, and so on, leading to holistic development.

Q How do you reach out to grass root level workers in remote areas?

We work intensively at the ground level, and closely with individuals and rural communities. Our team is a healthy mix of the young and the experienced, a good blend of individuals trained and educated in rural management on the one hand, and individuals with past experience in development and in the corporate sector on the other.

Over time, the core team has been supplemented with village-level resources drawn from rural areas. We have a significant physical presence in rural areas today, from Western UP to Eastern UP, MP and Jharkhand. This proximity helps build close ties with the beneficiary community, and at the same time, credibility for Mrida as well. Our emphasis is on making our initiatives sustainable. We leverage our corporate background and experience to establish SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) and a methodology into our operations, which facilitates scalability.

Q What kinds of activities are the rural communities engaged in?

Working with rural communities can be quite different than with other groups. For the large part, with agriculture being the mainstay, the men are associated with jobs related to land. In such cases, we focus on agri-interventions that help them derive maximum from their small and marginal land-holdings, be it through better cultivation practices, irrigation facilities using solar pumping solutions, higher-value crops, involvement in processing and value addition, and/or creation of market linkages — suitable combinations of such development initiatives have been undertaken in our catchment areas in Manipur, UP, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand. Mrida also works with, facilitates and mentors village level entrepreneurs, and self-help groups on initiatives such as mushroom cultivation, financial inclusion, computer-aided education, incense stick making, basket weaving, stitching, beauty parlour, and so on.

Here we have undertaken skill-development and skill enhancement programmes aimed at creating better products and services with an emphasis on quality, value addition, packaging, and marketing.

Q What is the ultimate picture of rural development according to you? How much have you been able to achieve it?

Our dream visualises the ultimate picture of rural development as one in which every rural citizen, particularly at the bottom level, is gainfully employed and is an integral part of the country. Women are at the centre of development rather than being marginalised. Increased levels of prosperity allow parents in rural areas to send their children to school and invest in the health of their families.

Development is seen as an exercise in active community engagement and wilful participation of all stakeholders rather than as donations, subsidies, and grants. The holistic development of rural India engenders a process of reverse migration from urban into rural areas. In the last five years since its inception, Mrida has sought to establish proof of concept of its holistic approach to development in a manner that is sustainable as well as scalable.

Q What are your future plans with Mrida?

Having started as a self funded venture, and successfully showcased the core concept of “The Business of Development”, Mrida is now seeking investments, in the form of PE/VC funding, Social Impact Investment, Debt, and Personal Investments from High Net Worth individuals, to scale up Impact, and the associated Top-line and Bottom- line, to the next level(s). Impacting even a million lives will according to us, barely scratch the surface in the Development Sector that we operate in.

In this context, we would like to do in an Open Source Mode, to motivate a progressively larger number of individuals and organisations to engage in similar activities and interventions/initiatives – in the “Business of development”.