Solving for the traders and farmers by leveraging the existing farming ecosystem
Image: Madhu KapparathBijak co-founders (from left): Jitender Bedwal, Nukul Upadhye and Nikhil Tripathi at a wholesale market in Gurugram.
The ‘middlemen’ or arhtiyas, agriculture traders, commission agents and wholesalers, are often seen as an obstacle in the agriculture economy because it is said that due to these agents, farmers don’t get the price they deserve for their produce. But farmers have been selling to agents for ages and the processes and trading practices in this sector have remain unchanged for decades.
A bunch of friends saw an opportunity here and decided to make things easier for traders as well as farmers. Rather than changing anything, they decided to leverage and make use of the existing farming ecosystem. According to them, the problem is so complex and the market so fragmented that they need the support of the prevailing network. The idea is to focus on gaps like data analysis, and bridging financing gaps using technology, without changing anything for the unorganised workers in the supply chain who can continue to focus on their own processes developed over generations.
In April 2019, Nukul Upadhye, Jitender Bedwal, Nikhil Tripathi, Mahesh Jakhotia and Daya Rai co-founded Bijak, a B2B marketplace for agricultural commodities that connects buyers, sellers, traders, wholesalers, food processors, retailers and farmers. It allows producers to sell their produce at real-time prices to wholesalers and retailers. The startup also offers loans for buyers and working capital for producers. It provides aggregated logistics services to eliminate wastage and avoid partial truck loads. Other features include digitising transactions with electronic book-keeping, advance payments, and an individual rating system. Bijak’s mobile application is available on iOS and Android platforms.
“Traders have built their domain expertise over generations and we thought leveraging this skill is important. These agriculture traders have been acting as a backbone in the agriculture value chain for years and they are an integral part of the ecosystem. We can optimise the value chain without eliminating them, maybe by making them more accountable, by leveraging technology,” says Tripathi, one of the co-founders.