Originally from Bihar, Prabhat Kumar went on to become an engineer and co-founded a healthcare company that allowed him to travel to at least 25 countries.
“I was winning several accolades and meeting successful people worldwide. It is a perception that most successful Biharis settle abroad. People expected the same from me,” he says.
“More than the individual success, I felt it was high time that I work on the success of my native people instead of just mocking their circumstances,” he adds.
After coming to Gaya, Prabhat spoke to local farmers and understood the gaps in the industry. “Farmers believe that the kewal (black) soil in the region is not fit for cultivating crops other than paddy and wheat,” he shares.
However, Prabhat was hopeful of reaping benefits from farming. In 2015, he sent 10 farmers to Maharashtra to understand the potential of horticulture crops.
“A single farmer there was earning Rs 15 lakh from an acre of land by growing horticulture crops like pomegranate, grapes, and onions. Contrarily, the entire village here could not imagine earning this amount,” he laughs.
Coming back, farmers opted for onion cultivation as it is a nonperishable crop. After four to five months, they doubled their income by investing Rs 4 per kg and getting Rs 10 per kg.
Later on, they introduced mushrooms. “In conventional farming, farmers bear recurring expenses for one-time income whereas, in mushroom farming, there is a one-time expense to procure the bags and get recurring income daily,” he says.
After mushrooms, Prabhat trained farmers to grow seed corn, baby corn, and strawberries which gave immediate results and better income.
Prabhat provides an end-to-end solution to these farmers by helping them procure inputs, training them to learn new crops, and providing them with a marketplace to sell their produce.
Starting with 10 farmers, today he is associated with 25,000 farmers in 500 villages who have doubled their incomes by growing horticulture crops.
“I still feel this is not enough. Through value-addition, we want to increase farmer income to five times so that we do not lag behind progressive states like Maharashtra,” he shares.