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Empowering a generation of Farmepreneurs

This initiative, though not new to the world, was launched in 2017 in Vidarbha to support farmers through seed funding and technology know-how. We took it one step further by asking the farmers to invest back into the project the following year to keep the chain going. We started with a small group of 30 farmers, all of whom were deep in debt and without access to funds to farm their land for the coming monsoon season. Some of them are the widows of farmers who, steeped in debt and unable to carry on, had taken their own lives.

2 minute read

At the start of the 2018 cycle, these 30 farmers had collected seed funds and additional funds to support another 12 farmers. I would like to share with you the story of Raju Bhise, one of the most outstanding success stories from our original 30.

Raju Bhise is one of three brothers with 14 acres of ancestral land divided into three parcels. Lack of rain and an inadequate water delivery system had steeped him in debt with no hope for the future.

With his loan from Shivprabha, he expanded his farm's water delivery system and planted cotton. He received an excellent yield. But this wasn't enough for Raju. With the help of a Shivprabha expert, he is now also cultivating Brinjals, a Vidharbha staple and Lady's Fingers. Raju also bought a bike so he could take his produce to market directly. With timely deliveries, Raju is earning almost Rs 50,000 every month. He has now also set up a flour mill in Lonwadi and has become a true farmepreneur!

There are many such Rajus in the Vidharbha region and even the rest of the country - hungry for success, their ambitions held back by circumstance. All they need is an opportunity provided by companies like Fabtech.

Fabtech's Life Engineering mission speaks about saving lives by building pharmaceutical capability in places that have none to bring down the cost of life-saving medicines and making them easily accessible. I will go one step further and say that Fabtech extends the Life Engineering philosophy to everything they do. A life is a life - whether a farmer or a patient.

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Tell us what you are building and where. An engineer will read your message and answer it. We reply within 24 hours.

What helps us reply faster
  • The process. What you will make, in what dosage form, and at about what scale. For example: tablets, capsules, liquids, sterile injectables, API or biologics. Your answer changes almost every later step of the project.
  • The containment requirement. If the material is potent, tell us its OEB band. OEB (occupational exposure band) is a grade that shows how little of a material a worker can safely be exposed to. This one figure decides if you need a booth, an isolator or a contained suite. Their costs differ by an order of magnitude, which means about ten times.
  • The market. Tell us which regulator will inspect the facility. Also tell us the electrical supply at the site: 50 Hz or 60 Hz. The format of the documents and the specification of the equipment both depend on this.
  • The state of the site. Greenfield (an empty plot), brownfield (a site used before), an extension, or a retrofit into a running plant. A retrofit means new work inside a plant that is still in production. It is a different engineering problem from an empty plot, and usually a harder one.
  • Your timeline. Include any regulatory or commercial date the project has to meet.

For a single piece of equipment rather than a facility, tell us four things: the machine, the material, the throughput and the destination market. Throughput is how much material the machine must process in a set time.

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