Midland Bank holds training workshop on capacity building of textile and apparel businesses in Bangladesh with Aavishkaar Capital GSCSF Fund and Intellecap’s CAIF- Coverage in The Financial Express, Bangladesh

Intellecap & IDH Blog | Accelerating Net-Zero Transitions in Agriculture and Food Systems
As climate change accelerates, transforming agriculture and food systems to reduce emissions has become a global imperative. Technologies for a net-zero transition in agriculture and food systems are playing a critical role in complementing existing climate action initiatives.
Intellecap & IDH are jointly studying these technologies to better understand their potential use-cases in mitigating emissions and how they can be integrated into businesses, governments, and developmental agencies’ strategies.
This article provides an overview of the ongoing study and highlights some early findings related to emission hotspots, technology use-cases, benefits, and principles related to adoption in the smallholder context.
A Farmer’s Struggle: The Impact of Climate Change on Smallholder Agriculture
Imagine a smallholder farmer in a low-income country, let’s call him Rajiv, who has been cultivating maize for generations on his family’s land. Over the years, he has witnessed the effects of climate change firsthand. Erratic rainfall patterns, prolonged droughts, and the increasing prevalence of pests and diseases have made it more challenging for him to maintain a stable crop yield. The rising cost of fertilizers and other farm inputs has only added to his financial burden. Rajiv is aware that his agricultural practices contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, but he feels powerless to change the situation.
Rajiv’s story illustrates the challenges faced by smallholder farmers worldwide, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). These farmers are not only struggling to adapt to the changing climate but also grappling with their role in the global emissions problem. The urgent need for net-zero transitions in agriculture and food systems calls for innovative solutions that address the unique challenges faced by farmers like Rajiv……
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Meeting of Tradition with Transformation” – Interview of Vineet Rai, Founder, Aavishkaar Group in Agriculture Today May 2025 Issue (Print)
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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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Midland Bank holds training workshop on capacity building of textile and apparel businesses in Bangladesh with Aavishkaar Capital GSCSF Fund and Intellecap’s CAIF- Coverage in The Financial Express, Bangladesh
June, 03, 2025Share
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Midland Bank hosts workshop to boost ESG capacity in textile sector with Aavishkaar Capital GSCSF Fund and Intellecap’s CAIF- Coverage in The Business Standard, Bangladesh
June, 03, 2025Share
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Meeting of Tradition with Transformation” – Interview of Vineet Rai, Founder, Aavishkaar Group in Agriculture Today May 2025 Issue (Print)
May, 23, 2025Share

Midland Bank holds training workshop on capacity building of textile and apparel businesses in Bangladesh with Aavishkaar Capital GSCSF Fund and Intellecap’s CAIF- Coverage in The Financial Express, Bangladesh

Midland Bank hosts workshop to boost ESG capacity in textile sector with Aavishkaar Capital GSCSF Fund and Intellecap’s CAIF- Coverage in The Business Standard, Bangladesh

Meeting of Tradition with Transformation” – Interview of Vineet Rai, Founder, Aavishkaar Group in Agriculture Today May 2025 Issue (Print)
Read the exclusive print interview of Vineet Rai, Founder, Aavishkaar Group and Member of Organizing Committee & Chair, AgriTech panel of Startup Mahakumbh in Agriculture Today May 2025 Issue.
In this exclusive interaction at Startup Mahakumbh 2025, Vineet discusses the role and future of AgriTech startups in India, current trends, emerging tech and the Aavishkaar Group’s vision for the Indian AgriTech sector.
“The intersection of climate change, sustainable agriculture, and profitability is at the heart of the AgriTech movement. Startups need to integrate sustainability into their core business models, ensuring that profit does not come at the expense of the environment. The future of AgriTech lies in creating businesses that balance profitability with social and environmental responsibility,” said Vineet Rai, Founder and Vice-Chairman, Aavishkaar Group.
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As the Chair of the Agritech Pavilion, what can we expect from this edition of Startup Mahakumbh?
At Startup Mahakumbh, the Agritech Pavilion represents the meeting of tradition with transformation. This is the area where the wisdom of the farmers meets the youthful exuberance of startup entrepreneurs and their technology prowess to build a narrative where Indian farmers would deliver on the promise of Global Food security and enhance their own livelihood and contribution to the National GDP from Agriculture. This is the narrative of Viksit Bharat@2047 so beautifully espoused by our Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi.
This year, the Agritech Pavilion is the largest pavilion at Mahakumbh and is twice as large as last year, with more than 100+ startups showcasing advanced technology innovative strategies, global thinking from Production thought processes, supply chain inefficiencies, resource mismanagement, and technological advancements.
This edition promises to spotlight solutions that blend scalability with sustainability embarking on a new era where technology catalyzes social and environmental impact. You would see new-age technology, loT devices, new-age drones, cutting-edge biotechnology solutions, and at the same time, farmers’ participation and enthusiasm around on-ground progress at the pavilion
At the Agritech Pavillon, farmers would rub shoulders with startup founders, Scientists, angel investors, Venture funds, Investment bankers, and farmer-producer companies to discuss a farmer centered world market. For us, Startup Mahakumbh 2025 represents movement that’s building a community, sparking collaboration, and inspiring startups to reimagine the future of Indian agriculture.
How do you see this platform shaping the future of AgriTech startups in India?
India’s AgriTech ecosystem is at a crucial Infection point Startup Mahakumbh is not just a showcase-it’s a catalyst for systemic change. By bringing in the farmers through the farmer producers companies with entrepreneurs, investors, government stakeholders and corporates, this platform creates an environment where collaboration surpasses competition.
We see this pavilion being led by farmers who are entrepreneurs working closely with global startups from AgriTech powerhouse countries such as Israel, Netherlands and the USA to integrate farmer’s wisdom in the solution to the Global Food Security challenge while also addressing global sustainability issues. We would like the Agritech pavilion to represent the Indian tradition of sustainable growth with a global outlook.
We are very confident that this show case of startup and farmer wisdom would enhance global flows of capital into the Agritech domain, along with mentorship and stronger global market linkages. This would inspire startups to build from India and for the world, doing so with the Indian farmer at the center delivering inclusive growth a reality.
What are the current trends in AgriTech Investments, and what key factors do Investors look for in AgriTech startups today?
Indian Agriculture represents one of the largest potential addressable markets but is plagued with inefficiencies around input supply, productivity, post-harvest storage and high-quality processing as the key challenges it is obvious that technology would play a critical role in alleviating these challenges and it is also obvious that the farmer would at the center of these technological innovations. A lot of work is happening around supply chain optimization, precision agriculture, weather technology, processing technologies, biotechnology and sustainable food systems, including soil carbon credits and areas such as animal husbandry, poultry and alternate protein.
Indian investors are looking at AgriTech as potential global companies that would not only build scale but also bring about new innovations in business models that would integrate smallholder farmers in the global supply chain as equal participants with strong economies for them.
How do you see emerging technologies like Al, loT, and blockchain transforming smallholder farming in India? What challenges need to be addressed for wider adoption?
Emerging technologies like the ones mentioned are being used to predict weather patterns, optimize irrigation and provide real-time data on soil health. This creates a connected ecosystem where sensors monitor crop conditions and alert farmers about pests or diseases. Blockchain can ensure transparency and traceability in the supply chain, helping farmers get a fair price for their produce.
We believe improved connectivity, better business models for affordability and improved margins and more work on awareness would help wider spread of these technologies backed by large long-term investments. We see long term patient capital through Impact investment, a deeper Indian capital pool with strong government backing from Institutions such as NABARD and State Bank of India alongside aggressive venture capital and private equity has the potential to take these cutting-edge technological ideas deeper into India.
What policy changes or government Initiatives do you believe could further accelerate AgriTech Innovation and Investment In India?
The Indian government has already made significant strides in supporting the AgriTech ecosystem, from initiatives like the PM-KISAN to the National Mission on Agricultural Extension & Technology. Moreover, thanks to strategic initiatives by the government and institutions like NABARD through its AgriSURE Fund, established with a corpus of Ps. 750 crore, exemplifies this commitment by supporting innovative, technology-driven startups in agriculture and allied areas.
Complementing this, the government’s Agriculture Accelerator Fund has been instrumental in nurturing Agri entrepreneurs, providing financial assistance at both the idea and seed stages, thereby fostering innovation across various agricultural domains. These initiatives, among others, underscore a well- coordinated effort to foster innovation and sustainability in Indian agriculture, creating a conducive environment for AgriTech startups to thrive and contribute significantly to the sector’s evolution.
With growing concerns about climate change and sustainable agriculture, how can AgriTech startups drive responsible farming practices while ensuring profitability?
The intersection of climate change, sustainable agriculture, and profitability at the heart of the AgriTech movement Startups need to integrate sustainability into their core business models, ensuring that profit does not come at the expense of the environment. The future of AgriTech lies in creating businesses that balance profitability with social and environmental responsibility. Responsible farming practices are not only viable but necessary for long-term business growth. We see emerging work around Soil Carbon green credits, Small Holder Farmer bio sequestration projects integrating major impact goals into global business models helping us to alleviate farmer concerns, climate concerns and building long term business models.
What is your vision for the Indian AgriTech sector over the next five years? How do you see Aavishkaar Group contributing to this evolution?
I envision a scenario where technology is embedded at every level of farming from the input stage and precision tools for farmers to AI driven analytics for large scale operations. I see Indian agriculture as one of the potential solutions for global food security concerns. We genuinely see multiple Indian AgriTech startups becoming unicorns and tapping the IPO markets over the next 5 years.
Aavishkaar Group will play a catalytic role in this transformation. We will remain committed to investing in impact-driven AgriTech startups that are tacking the most pressing challenges in agriculture-be it through data science, renewable energy solutions, or innovative farming techniques. Our focus will always be on nurturing entrepreneurs with the larger vision of transforming agriculture for the greater good.
In the coming years, we will work closely with farmers, innovators, policy- makers, and global thought leaders to ensure that India is at the forefront of the AgriTech revolution. Our role will be to provide capital, mentorship, and market access, enabling local and global ecosystems so that these businesses can scale and deliver the lasting impact that India needs.
Now on Stands -Agriculture Today Magazine May Issue 2025 (Print)
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