By Neeta Lal, Correspondent
New Delhi Meet India's most erudite greengrocer.
Kaushalendra, 27, is a business graduate from the blue-chip Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad - one of the world's toughest B-schools to get into - who spurned plum job offers to hawk vegetables on the streets of Patna, Bihar, one of India's most underdeveloped states.
Clad in shirt and trousers, the bespectacled youth, popularly known as the "MBA sabziwalla", has been a familiar sight in the bourgeois Kankarbagh colony in Patna since last month.
But mind you, Kaushalendra is no ordinary vendor. Unlike others of his ilk, the entrepreneur's user-friendly handcart is crafted from fibre which he developed himself - with a little help from his IIM peers and teachers of course - to make carrying a vegetable load of up to 200kg a breeze.
The cart also has an attached weighing machine and is ice-cooled to keep vegetables sold under the brand name "Samridhi" - dewy fresh for up to five days. As a deliberate marketing ploy, the savvy vendor also prices his vegetables lower than the market.
Kaushalendra - who belongs to a family of farmers and expands the acronym "MBA" as Mattar-Bhindi-Aloo (Peas, lady's fingers and potatoes) - says that he dreams of morphing Bihar into India's vegetable hub. "I want vegetables grown in Bihar on dining tables everywhere - from Srinagar to Salem, from Shillong to Surat," he likes to tell journalists.
He also plans to take Samriddhi, launched by his NGO Kaushalya Foundation, across the country and even abroad within five years.
Cooperative
In a bid to establish direct links with vegetable growers across vast swathes of his underdeveloped state, Kaushalendra has tied up with more than 250 vegetable growers in Bihar's villages. His cooperative "Samriddhi" also works in synergy with the local Agriculture Technology Management Agency (ATMA).
Indeed the ambitious businessman has his future plans all chalked out. Towards that end, Kaushalendra recently placed an order for 50 more pushcarts financed by a collateral-free loan of Rs5 million (Dh422,998) from a nationalised bank. Kaushalendra also meticulously studies consumers' behaviour patterns and market trends to craft a blueprint for expansion.
Though the management graduate is now basking in media attention, he says, success didn't come easy. For starters, his parents were opposed to his seemingly pedestrian venture, urging him to take up a lucrative job like his peers. But Kaushalendra remained resolute in the face of stiff opposition.
However, the entrepre-neur's business plan isn't as plebian as it sounds. After topping his class of IIM-A in 2007, he says he did extensive fieldwork to gauge the market, meet the local farmers and minutely study cultivation techniques before finely calibrating his unique business model. Only after he was convinced of the immense potential of his plan, did he apply for a bank loan of Rs4 million to flag off his project.
The unique entrepre-neurs' tie-up with ATMA, he says, will enable him to take his dream to vegetable producers in different parts of Bihar, a state which has lagged behind most Indian states in human and economic development indices.
Kaushalendra feels Bihar has enormous untapped potential for vegetables. "The vegetables produced in fertile land near the Ganges river can mark a turnaround for the state if marketed and promoted in the right manner," he says.
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