Nukul Upadhyay, co-founder of B2B agritech platform Bijak, explains the scale of credit and counterparty risk in Indian agricultural commerce.
Insight
Upadhyay: High prices alone cannot displace traditional Indian agricultural aggregators
“The relationships with farmers are not purely transactional. Right. So local aggregator is essentially the guy who would, you know, in Hindi, we say, Mayad Bhagwat, Shadi, Tino, who he finance karda hai. Right. So it's not a clear equation that I pay higher pr…”
Insight
Upadhyay: Agri trade inefficiency is driven by trust deficits, not information asymmetry
“So it's the inefficiency comes from trust deficit rather than from information symmetry.”
Insight
Upadhyay: Teaching farmers how to farm stems from founder arrogance
“We felt that, you know, it's sometimes very common for us people including us to assume that, you know, farmer needs help with what he's doing. Where then we come in and it's almost some sort of arrogance that we have that we can teach him to do farming which …”
Insight
Upadhyay: Direct farm-to-fork models are difficult across India's fragmented agriculture
“You cannot go in and try to, you know, just disrupt the existing ecosystem and be a replacement for it, right? So you're talking about thousands of regions, hundreds of crops, being able to do farm to fork there or farm to retail there is, is difficult.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Upadhyay: 85% of an Agri Aggregator's Margin Is Risk Premium
“So we have seen that, you know, of a local aggregator of all the money that he makes, 85% of it is just risk premium.”
Insight
Upadhyay: Market liquidity changes farmer behavior better than education does
“It becomes very easy to change behavior when you have when you are able to give assurance of liquidity, right? So I can come in and ask the farmer to grow pulses instead of sugarcane because the, you know, soil quality is such or the, you know, Water availabil…”