The Textile & Apparel sector looks to build capabilities to drive the transition to a circular economy

Intellecap Acquires 100% Stake In NR Management Consultants
Intellecap, the advisory arm of Aavishkaar Group announced 100% acquisition of NR Management Consultants India Private Limited (NRMC) to drive capital towards Natural resource driven Carbon Sequestration solutions to mitigate Climate change.
Intellecap is a global consulting firm dedicated to finding solutions that mitigate global risks of inequity in areas such as Impact investing, Climate Change and Gender. NRMC has deep research focus and understanding of natural resources and rural development in India and South East Asia. Drawing on its focus on nurturing entrepreneurship, Intellecap, through this acquisition looks to strengthen its Global positioning in Climate Change by incubating new initiatives and channelize strategic pools of capital to achieve tangible outcomes.
Speaking about the acquisition, Vikas Bali, CEO, Intellecap said, “Our objective of acquiring NRMC is focused on strengthening our resolve to build an effective Natural Resource based climate resilience strategy and drawing capital and delivering inclusive interventions through them. We see Climate change as humanities biggest challenge and Intellecap and Aavishkaar Group are committed to being significant part of the solution to this global problem. I invite all likeminded institutions, DFIs, Donors and commercial investors with focus on Climate Change to join hands with us, as together we can deliver real change and impact”
Speaking about the acquisition, Vineet Rai, Founder and Chairman, Aavishkaar Group said, “I am thrilled by this acquisition by Intellecap. Aavishkaar Group identifies Climate Resilience Investing as a Global Mega trend for the next decade and Intellecap has a big responsibility to lead the group in showing us solutions that would help us allocate capital effectively to combat Climate risk and offer true Resilience.”
“Intellecap and through it, the Aavishkaar Group offers a wide umbrella to NRMC expertise in Natural Resources. We all acknowledge that Climate change is the biggest challenge humanity is facing and with this partnership we would be able to use our knowledge and deep understanding of associated development challenges to drive capital toward real solutions that address climate resilience,” said Jayesh Bhatia, Founding Director, NRMC.
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Leveraging community leaders to build resilience against climate change in urban areas (Comment)
While cities cover only two per cent of the global land area, they contribute around 70 per cent of the global greenhouse emissions, one of the main drivers of climate change.
The UN forecasts that urbanisation and population growth could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050, with almost 90 per cent living in Asia and Africa. Consequently, the urban contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change will only increase with time.
As a response, various stakeholders have designed climate change resilience products including cool roofs, home insulations, drip irrigation solutions and solar home systems that have seen heightened interest in India. While such products have seen a market, the uptake is concentrated among the richer sections.
The urban poor, who constitute almost 30 per cent of India’s urban population, do not have the knowledge or the capacity to pay for such products. It has always been a challenge to symbiotically combine all four components (informed customer targeting, low-cost marketing, innovative distribution and sales, and nurturing consumer goodwill) to design a marketing strategy for the urban poor. As a response, some organisations have started leveraging community-level leaders (CLLS) as marketing channels for such products.
The rationale for the CLLs comes from the effectiveness of the model in building long-term products resilient to climate change while simultaneously creating livelihoods. Some best practices that can be used to strengthen the efficacy of the CLL mode are:
* Design a product identification framework tool: Each product should be analysed on the basis of four parameters: a) demand for the product (number of households), b) affordability (price), c) profitability (percentage of price), and d) scalability (potential demand across different urban agglomerations). On the basis of analysis, only those products which score high on all parameters should be offered to the market.
* Conduct on-ground demand assessment: Understanding the customer becomes more important in such cases, particularly since the customers knowledge of the product is limited. Hence awareness levels, willingness to pay and customer demand becomes more critical. Such an on-ground assessment can help further shortlist products for a particular set of homogeneous households.
* Provide easy financing options: It is beneficial to help CLLs establish close networks with MFIs and other financial institutions to provide financing facilities to potential consumers, hence enhancing their ability to pay and increasing uptake.
* Segment CLLs based on skillsets and motivation: Classification of CLLs as per their sales skills and motivation is essential for success. Selling different products require different skillsets and a quick analysis can help in this matchmaking. Some parameters which can be used to assess skills include age, educational qualification, business experience, and technical skillsets.
* Capacity building: CLLs need a certain degree of training and it is observed that CLLs find it easier to sell better when trained rather than through close association with their communities.
* Build ownership in CLLs: Instead of making the product available free-of-cost, CLLs should be asked to invest in the product. If required, finance should be made available by partnering with co-operative banks and MFIs; that way one can build ownership in CLLs.
* Design standardised operational procedures (SOPs): Since the business model includes partnerships both with CLLs and product manufacturers, it is necessary to design SOPs to simplify the entire delivery process.

Inexpensive Impact: The Case for Frugal Innovations
Over 4 billion people around the world face unmet needs in core areas such as food, water, energy, health-care and housing. The market potential for these low-income populations is huge: Approximately 4.5 billion low-income people globally represent an annual purchasing capacity of US$ 5 trillion (PPP), with India, East Africa and South East Asia accounting for a sizable chunk of this market. Yet servicing this market is fraught with challenges, including customers’ limited ability to pay, poor infrastructure and latent demand. Catering to this market requires frugal innovation, which is about transforming adversity into opportunity, enhancing value and ultimately doing more with less, thereby impacting more people.
Many firms – both startups and corporates – have begun to design frugal, market-based solutions that include product and business model innovations to meet the unmet needs of billions of underserved customers. In Kenya, for example, Pad Heaven makes re-usable sanitary towels from banana fibers, and Ecopost uses plastic and agricultural waste as a resource to manufacture sustainable materials for the building, construction and transport industries. India is also a hotbed of frugal innovations, which spread across sectors. For example, Saral Designs markets an automatic machine that allows organizations to produce low-cost sanitary napkins, Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Smiti provides the Jaipur foot – a low-cost prosthetic leg, and Banka Bioloo sells sanitation systems that eliminate the need for off-site disposal of human waste. Each of these products highlights how such innovations can be game changers.
But frugal innovations are not just about products: Great potential also lies in business model innovation. Frugal innovations in services can include deep specialization in a niche segment of a huge market, tiered pricing systems and efficient use of human capital. These innovations respond not only to a lack of skilled human capital, but to an institutional void. For instance, Unilever’s small, affordable detergent sachets are priced at a more palatable level for the low-income populations in India and Africa. And Aravind Eye Care’s approach to performing cataract surgeries at large scale without compromising on quality highlights how process innovation can ensure inclusivity and service delivery in a sustainable manner.
Frugal innovation is also not limited to low–tech sectors. It can require, or be combined with, frontier science and technology. Products like Swach a high-tech portable water filter developed by Tata, HealthCubed Inc.’s Health Cube – an integrated, tablet-based, portable point-of-care diagnostic test device, and Agatsa’s pocket-sized 12-lead electrocardiogram have demonstrated how technology can not only be an enabler but an amplifier to both product and process innovations.
Lessons for the Circular Economy
While frugal innovations are commonly associated with developing economies, these innovations are not only for resource-constrained users – and they also address the issue of resource scarcity. The current “take, make and dispose” economy is not sustainable. Economic productivity is already being curbed by the rapid depletion of existing and readily available natural resources. These constraints require a shift in thinking towards a more circular model focusing on resource productivity, and a shift towards a “make, share and remake” model. This will be a key driver towards sustainability for frugal innovations of the future.
Principles from frugal innovations are directly applicable to this circular economy, as generating value from waste is common across African and Indian startups. For example, Kodjo Afate Gnikou built a $100 3D printer from electronic waste. And in Europe, the firm Qarnot has developed QH.1, a high-performance computing server that uses “waste heat” from its microprocessors to heat homes and other buildings.

Smart villages: Driving development through entrepreneurship
Over 68 percent of India’s population lives in rural areas. There has been a gradual increase in migration from villages to cities primarily for livelihood opportunities, better education, and healthcare facilities, among others. The rising burden on urban cities due to migration emphasises the need to transform villages so that they can meet the critical as well as aspirational needs of the villagers. This can be done using innovative technologies and transforming the service delivery models for villages. Transformed villages are called Smart Villages.
While the phrase ‘Smart Village’ has become a buzzword in policy and rural development discussion, there is no universal definition of such villages. Two things that are common to all Smart Villages are the extensive use of technology and integration of several key interventions in infrastructure and service delivery.
It’s an integrated approach of delivering access to skills and quality basic services including education, e-health, 24×7 power, safe food, among others.
There are numerous initiatives supported by the government, and spearheaded and supported by corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and philanthropic institutions.
The Government of India launched the Shyama Prasad Mukherji Rurban Mission (SPMRM) in 2016, with the objective to spur social, economic and infrastructural development in rural areas. The mission aims at making villages smart and growth centers of the nation. In its first phase, it targeted to develop a cluster of 300 Smart Villages over the next three years across the country. Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana, which envisages integrated development of selected villages was another step taken by government in this direction.
While the government-led initiatives rely on integration and convergence of the existing central and state government schemes to develop these Smart Villages or clusters, the CSR initiatives are generally more innovative in terms of implementation and use of technologies. For example, smartphone-maker Nokia has launched a Smartpur project which aims to create a sustainable ecosystem where community members can leverage digital tools to bring efficiency in daily lives. It aims to bring transparency in governance, economic prosperity for households and ease of access to various government services and information.
Tata Trusts supports agriculture intervention for tribal communities under its Lakhpati Kisan – Smart Villages program. While these CSR or philanthropic institutions do work closely with government institutions, their model of engagement and the partnership with the government vary significantly.
These initiatives have provided key learnings to empower institutions, build engagement models and frameworks for planning, and developing implementation strategies for Smart Villages.
We suggest learning from the Smart Cities mission, but we also caution that these learnings must be contextualised and synthesised, as Smart Villages are very different from Smart Cities. The latter are more focused on increasing the overall efficiency and improvement in civic infrastructure, while Smart Villages envisage the need of building the facilities from scratch.
One of the key challenges in developing Smart Villages is ensuring their sustainability. This can only be addressed if we build our Smart Village strategy with entrepreneurship at its core. Thankfully, India has one of the most vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem that is working towards addressing rural development challenges using innovative technologies and business models.
We have enterprises that are addressing healthcare needs (Glocal Healthcare Systems, mHealth, iKure), delivering quality education (Gyanshala, Hippocampus, Avanti), providing decentralised energy solutions (Sun Moksha, Mera Gao Power, Mlinda), transforming agriculture productivity (Ekgaon, Jain Irrigation, Milk Mantra), providing drinking water and sanitation services (Sarvajal, Svadha, Banka Bioloo), creating livelihood opportunities for women (Dharma Life, Frontier Markets, Sudiksha Knowledge Solutions), and so on. The need is to integrate this approach for the Smart Village vision.
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Launch of SMART AgTech Integration Facility 2022
May, 24, 2022Share
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Launch of SMART AgTech Integration Facility 2022: A Joint Endeavour of Govt. of Maharashtra and the World Bank
May, 18, 2022Share
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Maharashtra, World Bank launches SMART AgTech integration facility
May, 17, 2022Share

Launch of SMART AgTech Integration Facility 2022: A Joint Endeavour of Govt. of Maharashtra and the World Bank
The Government of Maharashtra and World Bank, in a joint endeavour, have launched the ‘SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022’ to transform rural Maharashtra through Disruptive Agricultural Technologies (DATs).
This facility is presently seeking applications from DAT solution providers, with a presence in India, to bring in digital and technical innovations in the agriculture sector. The facility will enable selected DAT solution providers to work directly with the Community Based Organizations (CBOs) in Maharashtra to implement transformative solutions.
The facility is a part of US$ 300 million Hon. Balasaheb Thackeray Agribusiness and Rural Transformation (SMART) project, which aims to enable collectives of smallholder farmers to participate in competitive agriculture value chains, facilitate agri-business investments, increase market access and productivity, and build resilience of crops to recurrent floods or droughts in the state. A key sub-component under the project is to facilitate adoption of DATs among CBOs in the state.
The SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022 will identify relevant DAT solution providers and facilitate interactions between the technology providers and CBOs to enable customization and adoption of appropriate solutions.
Speaking about the launch, the Agriculture Commissioner, Dheeraj Kumar, Govt of Maharashtra said, “We are excited to launch this facility and to have DAT solution providers from across India to work with the Government of Maharashtra (SMART) to build a resilient and robust agriculture technology ecosystem in the state. This is a unique collaborative concept which will connect DAT solution providers with Community Based Organization (CBOs) and provide them with the most relevant solutions to address their critical technological needs”.
The SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022 is supported by a grant from the Korea World Bank Partnership Facility (KWPF), a collaboration between Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance (MoEF) and the World Bank. The grant marks the first KWPF initiative in India. Intellecap, a pioneer in enabling ecosystems and channeling capital to nurture a sustainable and equitable society, is supporting the execution of the grant.
Manivannan Pathy and Adarsh Kumar, Team Leaders of the SMART project from the World Bank said, “The SMART Agtech Integration Facility addresses a critical challenge of harnessing the innovation and dynamism happening in the DAT space to improved outcomes for farmers in Maharashtra through supporting partnerships between farmers and selected DATs. This facility has the potential to demonstrate innovative solutions that can be scale up nationally.”
Smallholder farmers in Maharashtra face myriad challenges across the value chain. Though CBOs such as Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) and Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) play a significant role in helping farmers get access to finance, inputs, farm technologies, and agricultural market, technological limitations affect their ability to achieve their potential to increase productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness of farming operations.
According to Santosh Kumar Singh, Managing Director, Intellecap, “The SMART Agtech Integration Facility is a novel way for DATs to solve a real-time problem, the underlying impact of which is significant. We are excited to work with the Govt. of Maharashtra and the World Bank in finding solution providers who will be joining us in this journey to help discover and transform rural Maharashtra through their innovative ideas, which in turn will enable CBOs and farmers, address a few critical challenges across the value chain and improve agricultural productivity across the state”.
The SMART AgTech Integration Facility is seeking support from DAT solution providers specifically for
Interested DAT Solution providers can apply to the SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022 on the official site smartagtech.org/#

Maharashtra, World Bank launches SMART AgTech integration facility
The government of Maharashtra and World Bank, in a joint endeavour, have launched the ‘SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022’ to transform rural Maharashtra through Disruptive Agricultural Technologies (DATs).
MUMBAI, 17 May 2022: The government of Maharashtra and World Bank, in a joint endeavour, have launched the ‘SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022’ to transform rural Maharashtra through Disruptive Agricultural Technologies (DATs).
MUMBAI, 17 May 2022: The government of Maharashtra and World Bank, in a joint endeavour, have launched the ‘SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022’ to transform rural Maharashtra through Disruptive Agricultural Technologies (DATs).
This facility is presently seeking applications from DAT solution providers, with a presence in India, to bring in digital and technical innovations in the agriculture sector. The facility will enable selected DAT solution providers to work directly with the Community Based Organizations (CBOs) in Maharashtra to implement transformative solutions.
The facility is a part of US$ 300 million Balasaheb Thackeray Agribusiness and Rural Transformation (SMART) project, which aims to enable collectives of smallholder farmers to participate in competitive agriculture value chains, facilitate agri-business investments, increase market access and productivity, and build resilience of crops to recurrent floods or droughts in the state.
A key sub-component under the project is to facilitate adoption of DATs among CBOs in the state. The SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022 will identify relevant DAT solution providers and facilitate interactions between the technology providers and CBOs to enable customization and adoption of appropriate solutions.
Speaking about the launch, the Agriculture Commissioner, Dheeraj Kumar, Govt of Maharashtra said, “We are excited to launch this facility and to have DAT solution providers from across India to work with the Government of Maharashtra (SMART) to build a resilient and robust agriculture technology ecosystem in the state. This is a unique collaborative concept which will connect DAT solution providers with Community Based Organization (CBOs) and provide them with the most relevant solutions to address their critical technological needs”.
The SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022 is supported by a grant from the Korea World Bank Partnership Facility (KWPF), a collaboration between Korea’s Ministry of Economy and Finance (MoEF) and the World Bank. The grant marks the first KWPF initiative in India. Intellecap, a pioneer in enabling ecosystems and channeling capital to nurture a sustainable and equitable society, is supporting the execution of the grant.
Manivannan Pathy and Adarsh Kumar, Team Leaders of the SMART project from the World Bank said, “The SMART Agtech Integration Facility addresses a critical challenge of harnessing the innovation and dynamism happening in the DAT space to improved outcomes for farmers in Maharashtra through supporting partnerships between farmers and selected DATs. This facility has the potential to demonstrate innovative solutions that can be scale up nationally.”
Smallholder farmers in Maharashtra face myriad challenges across the value chain. Though CBOs such as Farmer Producer Companies (FPCs) and Primary Agricultural Credit Societies (PACS) play a significant role in helping farmers get access to finance, inputs, farm technologies, and agricultural market, technological limitations affect their ability to achieve their potential to increase productivity, efficiency, and competitiveness of farming operations.
According to Santosh Kumar Singh, Managing Director, Intellecap, “The SMART Agtech Integration Facility is a novel way for DATs to solve a real-time problem, the underlying impact of which is significant. We are excited to work with the Govt. of Maharashtra and the World Bank in finding solution providers who will be joining us in this journey to help discover and transform rural Maharashtra through their innovative ideas, which in turn will enable CBOs and farmers, address a few critical challenges across the value chain and improve agricultural productivity across the state”.
The SMART AgTech Integration Facility is seeking support from DAT solution providers specifically for (1) implementing digitization solutions for farmer collectives, (2) building value chain actor aggregation platforms, (3) enabling precision agriculture and automation services, (4) working with urban food systems and logistics solutions, (5) developing market linkage and traceability solutions, and (6) facilitating access to financial services.
Interested DAT Solution providers can apply to the SMART Agtech Integration Facility 2022 here
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