Name Vikram Ahuja | ||
Vikram Aditya Ahuja (born 6 July 1966) is the founder and director of Fazilka based company, Zamindara Farmsolutions. He was born into a family of farmers. He completed post graduate studies in Commerce at Punjab University and started his career marketing tractors and implements. His experiences in marketing and continuous exposure to agriculture made him realize that asset ownership served no purpose for small farmers. He developed a new Pay-for-Use model for mechanization needs of small farmers.
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Zamindara Farmsolutions
Vikram Aditya Ahuja is the founder and director of a Fazilka-based company Zamindara Farmsolutions. Together with his father Surinder Kumar Ahuja (Chairman)and Anurag Nagpal (Director), he founded the company to make agriculture implements and machinery accessible to small and marginal farmers. The "Blended Value Business Model" of Zamindara Farmsolutions has been recognized by the government in India as well as United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for which it regularly hosts and trains farmers from Africa. They have developed expertise in the field of “Sustainable agriculture for small/marginal farmers through affordable farm mechanization”. Vikram is considered a pioneer in the field of farm equipment rentals and is being given credit for creating awareness in Punjab on economical way of Pay-for-Use instead of outright purchase of underutilized farm machines.
Background
Farmers in India have traditionally taken costly bank loans to buy expensive farm equipment. This equipment has by and large been underutilized due to the small size of the farm holdings and the seasonality of use. In effect the farmer has to pay the equipment ownership cost every day of the year rather than the few days of usage cost that he should actually pay. Punjab has close to 0.5 million tractors for its 4.2 million hectares of land, truly a case of ‘Tractorization’ instead of ‘Mechanization’. The debt burden in Punjab outstrips the national average. With nearly 13 lakh farmers, Punjab has a per capita debt of Rs 42,000 compared to the national figure of Rs 15,000. As of March 31, 2008, farmers of Punjab owed a whopping Rs 35,400 crores. Situation is now similar in other states.
Results and achievements
Awards and recognition
Vikram Ahuja’s contribution in the field of knowledge dissemination to marginal farmers has been widely reported in the press and acknowledged by Punjab Agriculture University (PAU), Farmers Commission, Department of Agriculture- Punjab, Department of Dairy Punjab and National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), where he gets regularly invited to participate in different policy making discussions. Among other things, Vikram’s inputs have also been acknowledged at CIAE/ ICAR Bhopal, Policy paper on affordable Mechanization of Agriculture in India.
Department of Agriculture and Cooperation, Ministry of Agriculture, GOI, On Farm mechanization mission in the next 5-year plan, Foof and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation (FAO) Headquarters, Italy. “Pathways out of Poverty”, May 2011.
Recently, Vikram was invited for a conference of the United Nation's Economic and Social Council for Asia and Pacific (ESCAP) at Serpong, Indonesia. The theme of the conference was "Enabling environment for custom hiring of agricultural machinery." After coming to know what UN agricultural experts were trying to achieve at the conference is already in practice in Punjab by Vikram, he was made part of the core group to formulate discussions on how custom hiring of agricultural machinery could be popularized and taken forward.