Naandi Foundation

A Robert S McNamara Fellow of the World Bank, Manoj Kumar shifted career from banking to social sector with a pit stop in micro-finance, before taking over as CEO of Naandi in 2000 AD. As the founding CEO of Naandi Foundation, Manoj disrupted the NGO space in India by being the first to create a sustainable model of outsourcing government programs and demonstrating successful large scale implementation with efficiency and outcomes. 

Under Manoj's leadership, Naandi has established a large footprint in the area of Sustainable Agriculture and Small Farmer Livelihoods. His two-decade long work in the hilly Araku region of south-eastern India is transforming lives of 100,000 indigenous people, bringing them permanently out of poverty. His pioneering work has transformed the eco-fragile region into the world's largest Regenerative Agriculture hub spread across 1500 square kilometres, where collaboration with local farmer families has resulted in the planting of 20 million trees. 

Araku is a remote valley amidst the hills of the Eastern Ghats of India, inhabited by indigenous people reduced to abject poverty over the past few decades, with no schools or health care, depleted forests and dying soil. Poverty and bleak prospects had made this fertile ground for armed insurgency.

Manoj’s mission to bring these communities out of poverty started with a deep dive into understanding their lives, their psyche and their aspirations by living with them, setting up small village schools and bringing in trained nurses. Manoj began to see the need to become a ‘portfolio manager’ – planning a judicious mix of crops – millet, paddy and fruits for food; coffee, pepper and timber for cash income - grown using regenerative agriculture practices. And then establishing optimal market linkages for better prices would set the farmer families firmly on the road out of poverty. 

What used to be lush hill forests inhabited by half a million indigenous people living in harmony with nature in Araku of south-eastern India has become, over the past decades, an eco-fragile region characterised by loss of biodiversity, rapid erosion of soil and felling of trees – along with growing influence of armed insurgents. The forest dwelling people have been pushed out of their habitat and ‘mainstreamed’ into acute poverty. In addition, the growing threat of carbon depletion from the soil has made this region increasingly vulnerable to climate change. Through his work Manoj seeks to reverse this trend of depleting forests, diminishing biodiversity and increasing poverty.

In India, as in the world over, small holding farmers are in a majority (globally, about 84% farms are smaller than 2 hectares), producing most of the food. But it is also this marginal farmer family that is starving and getting poorer each year. They are at the forefront bearing the brunt of soil degradation, depleting water sources, deforestation, over grazing, mono-cropping, dependence on chemical inputs. Input costs of agriculture are increasing, pushing the farmer into debt and market prices are unpredictable, making agriculture a perpetually loss making enterprise. 

Manoj's team at Naandi has been supporting indigenous farmer families in the Araku region to develop shade-grown coffee plots on degraded hillsides using regenerative agriculture practices.They also grow a judicious mix of trees which yield food, nutrition, fodder and cash incomes round the year. Farmer families are trained in scientific application of organic amendments to the soil and helped with the supply of bio-inputs for the soil. Further, best practices in farm management and harvesting are demonstrated and incentivised across the 700 villages where Manoj works with his team. The resultant agricultural produce is thus of a quality far superior than anything grown in that area till now. At the same time, these small holding farmers have been organised into a collective, which participates actively in systematic collection of produce from the farm gate, operating processing units and negotiating prices for sale of the produce. Stringent monitoring of agriculture and processing practices ensure that organic and other certification is retained year after year, which help to fetch higher prices. Regenerative agriculture and planting of over 20 million trees has resulted in carbon sequestration on a large scale, preventing erosion, retaining moisture and significantly mitigating the impact of climate change.

Manoj works with indigenous people of Araku in a remote hilly part of south-eastern India. Classified by the government as belonging to ‘Scheduled Tribes’, they were mainly forest dwellers who were forced to adapt to agriculture from the 1950s due to increasing pressure on forest land and foraging. Despite comprising over 35 tribes, these communities have a common value system of sharing & living in harmony with nature and are custodians of a rich collective memory of forest produce being a source of sustenance. At an average altitude of about 3500 feet above sea level, over the last few decades, the region has been characterised by loss of biodiversity, rapid erosion of soil, felling of trees, loss-making agriculture activities and the inevitable consequence of extreme poverty.

Manoj spent several years in the early 2000s living in these villages taking every opportunity to engage in conversations with these communities, gradually building trust, and an understanding of their struggles and aspirations. Soon they collectively developed a vision and project design. For a decade now, this collaboration has been yielding increasing cash incomes and improving biodiversity of the region. 

These indigenous small holding farmers have been forgotten by the mainstream. As the rest of the country moved forward with infrastructure development and advances in information technology, they were forgotten. They were remembered only when trees needed to be cut, and minerals needed to be extracted. This resulted in the desertification of what used to be eco-rich forested hills, and a community with no viable means of livelihoods, no health care, no connectivity to the mainstream. Manoj's patient work over a decade has included them in a discussion around their own development and the creation of pathways out of poverty. 

From his experience in development banking and then rural micro-finance in early years of his career, Manoj had begun to closely observe the struggles of small holding farmers in India. Their lives were controlled by factors not in their control. Disempowered by their lack of education, health and access to information, they were always at the receiving end of exploitation by multiple forces in society. When Manoj took over as CEO of Naandi and made 'eradicating poverty' the vision statement of the organisation, he decided that the focus area of work would be small holding farmers. He spent almost a year living in remote villages, taking every opportunity to join discussions of villagers and farmers, seeing how their travails would get aggravated during certain seasons, how their families coped with the poverty stricken conditions, what they ate, how they celebrated, seeing closely bonded they were with their land and the forest. He was convinced with each passing day that Naandi would have to come up with a project idea that would permanently pull these communities out of poverty. It was Araku villagers and a small team of colleagues that, together with Manoj, embarked upon this poverty eradication project. 

Manoj's entire working life has been dedicated to finding solutions to extreme poverty. He took over as CEO of Naandi in 2000 and has grown it into one of India’s largest non-profits which has successfully eliminated poverty from the lives of millions. 

With a vision of eradicating poverty, Naandi was ingrained, from inception, with Manoj’s passion to end extreme poverty. The first ten years were devoted to reaching benefits of government welfare programmes to the unreached poor. Naandi set up kitchens in the remotest of places, so that school going children would get a freshly cooked, nutritious noon meal. For ten years, Naandi served noon meals to one million children every day. 

Manoj's deep immersion into lives of small holding farmers convinced him that agriculture, which gave livelihoods to 70% of India’s population, had to be transformed for poverty to be eradicated. His search for the perfect crucible for starting his experiment led him to the hilly Araku region, inhabited by indigenous people impoverished by the mainstream development model and a landscape denuded of its rich biodiverse forests. Manoj has been working here for over a decade and has brought over 100,000 indigenous people out of poverty. 

Manoj is a banker turned social entrepreneur and CEO of Naandi since 2000. In 2012, he was named by Financial Times, London as one of 25 Indians to watch. He is also a Moderator & Fellow of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. Manoj was awarded the John P McNulty Prize for his pioneering entrepreneurial work in reversing climate change in the Araku hills to uplift the indigenous people from poverty by creating a world-class gourmet luxury coffee, which is retailed in Paris, by the name Araku Coffee. 

Manoj has curated a leadership team at Naandi that represents deep knowledge and vast experience in biodiversity management, sustainable agriculture, community engagement and innovative marketing. This makes him uniquely well positioned to deliver this project. Manoj has also demonstrated, over the past two decades, extra ordinary abilities to raise funds - individual donations, domestic grants as well as philanthropy capital - to realise the vision of eradicating poverty through a large number of projects across India. 

In close to 30 years of his working life, Manoj has had the opportunity of working closely with a wide range of stakeholders - from poverty stricken marginal farmers in remote villages and unemployed urban youth of low income families to leading captains of Indian industry committed to large scale philanthropy and internationally reputed think tanks. This experience has enriched his ability to visualise clearly, articulate convincingly and execute effectively, his dreams of eradicating poverty in India.

After the first few crop cycles, Manoj realised most Araku farmers were in the clutches of unscrupulous traders and middlemen who would lend them money at high interest, necessitated by the fact that agri-livelihoods yield cash only once or twice a year. The farmers had to turn to these middlemen to meet their immediate needs of food and health care. They would commit/promise their harvest to the middlemen in return for an immediate cash loan. For Manoj and his team this meant that the harvest was not coming to them for processing and sale at competitive prices. How then would they realise their objective of reducing poverty of Araku's small holding farmers?

Manoj realised he had to address the urgent cash flow needs of the poor farmers. He decided that Naandi would make part payments at regular intervals (eg every two months) to the farmers, in anticipation of the expected harvest. It was a leap of faith, which stands vindicated till today, because of the relationship of trust and respect that Manoj and his team have built painstakingly over the years. The assured source of cash at fixed intervals helped farmers to get out of the clutches of the middlemen.

In his 20 years at the helm of Naandi Foundation, Manoj has demonstrated on many occasions sterling leadership qualities which have resulted in successes in multiple projects. They have also inspired best talent of the country to join Manoj's team and contribute to his march against poverty in India.

Here is a story that is specific to the organic coffee project in Araku. Manoj knew that unless the coffee becomes the top 1% in global quality benchmark, the Araku farmers won’t get huge premium needed for profits. For this, each farm, bush and cherry had to be hand-picked at the most optimal conditions. The game changer was - cherry picking only deep red ones. It was a challenge to make every farmer in Araku, across 720 villages, do this. Applying principles of behavioural economics to ‘nudge’ the farmers, Manoj launched the Red Truck, which would come by each farm and procure the cherries only if the farmer had his entire harvest for the day in brightest shade of red. If he did, he got a premium that was four times the market price and twice the price offered by the Blue Truck, which procured all other shades of red cherries. 

Manoj's work is disruptive because it transforms the small holding farmer, hitherto poverty stricken, weak, mute receiver of subsidies, into an entrepreneur, an orchard owner, who uses professional farm management services, mechanised equipment and technology and earns profits. He is aware of the need to minimise climate change and all his agriculture practices are aligned towards this need. Once the upward spiral of earning profit, better quality agriculture produce, responsibility to environment, improved soil and water, reduced cost of cultivation, more profit margin kicks in, the need for external pushes becomes minimal. This is the innovative aspect of Manoj's work - after the critical foundation phase, the inherent push for quality and growth, keeps propelling it forward. 

When the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) were announced in 2015, Manoj was delighted to find that his decades long work resonated very strongly with at least two of the SDGs - SDG 2 Zero Hunger and SDG 15 - Life on Land.

Naandi Foundation's current work with small holding farmers serves 100,000 people. In the coming year, we expect to retain this same scale, as the COVID-19 pandemic may not allow us to follow our expansion plans. In five years from now, we aim to reach at least 500,000 people.

The impact of Manoj’s work in the Araku region can be easily measured not just by the annual cash income of the indigenous farmer families, but also by agricultural yield, number of trees planted, volume of carbon sequestered and the fact that Araku coffee is sold as a global gourmet brand in Paris stores. Impoverished gun-toting peasants have become dynamic enterprising estate owners. Climate change has been reversed. Various state governments have begun replicating this template of poverty eradication in their states.

In the next five years, he aims to take this successful 'Arakunomics' template to touch 400,000 more lives in larger Araku zone. 

Manoj also plans to take this template to other parts of India which are under agrarian distress. He has made an initial foray into the Vidarbha region in western India. This region is infamous because of the high incidence of farmer suicides. Changing over to mono-cropping on a large scale, replacing food crops with cash crops, excessive use of chemical inputs and indebtedness due to increasing cost of cultivation have all resulted in acute agrarian distress in this region. Demonstrating success in extricating these farmers from the clutches of poverty and depression would be a major milestone for Indian agriculture. It will revive hope for millions of small holding farmers in other parts of the country, who are struggling against adversities of a similar kind. 

They key factors for success in reaching Manoj's goals are predictable weather conditions and sufficiency of funding to execute the work. Of course the world is in the midst of a pandemic currently and while the immediate effects of it are visible, the long term impact on the country's economy is not yet known. These would no doubt have a bearing on the work of Manoj and his team at Naandi Foundation. 

Unpredictable rain patterns and temperatures can have a major impact on his plans for the next five years. Manoj's project is in a rainfed area, success of crops is entirely dependent on timely and adequate rainfall. Sudden and severe storms and typhoons too could destroy the plots and render them unproductive in one fell sweep. 

Manoj has been successful in obtaining sufficient grant funding over the last decade and more for implementing this project. The compelling case for empowering small holding farmers on the one hand and his commitment to reversing climate change on the other, have made this project attractive to grant makers and donors in the past. However, Manoj is acutely aware that availability of grant or philanthropy money may take a hit due to the pandemic situation and consequent economic slowdown.

Over the past decade of work in the Araku region, we have succeeded in planting 23 million trees. The first few million trees that Manoj and his team had planted have now grown into trees, providing reasonable forest cover and sequestering proven carbon in the soil. It is hoped that this is going to help to bring weather patterns, especially rain patterns into a predictable frame. Secondly, regenerative agriculture practices go a long way in making the crops resilient and able to withstand vagaries of weather. The increase in microbial activity in the soil makes the plants receive more nutrition from the soil. And this increased nutrition in the plant makes it strong. These factors, it is hoped, will help Manoj face the climate related challenges.

In order to overcome any possible hurdle in funding, Manoj has decided to dedicate a small team for grant-writing and reaching out to potential donors. This team will study trends in the world of philanthropy and actively approach potential funders.  

Manoj works with a variety of partners - each one bringing a different set of expertise into the project. The key partner in this project is the one that takes on responsibility of marketing the coffee grown in Araku. There is another partner that specialises in measuring canopy cover of the growing forest and measuring carbon sequestered.