Green People
He climbed the hills in search of goats to manufacture Himalayan goat cheese. Little did Mr Roopesh know that the higher altitudes had much more to offer him than goats’ milk.
Mr. Roopesh Rai, Founder and Managing Director at Green People talks about his journey, venture and future plans.
The IDEATION
I was a Director-Marketing for the Taj Group for quite some time and then I was doing business development for an international travel company. The Kedarnath catastrophe, which is considered the biggest catastrophe in India after Tsunami, was what drew me to this place. I was more of an inquisitive visitor as far as a travel expert is concerned. I wanted to understand what impact the pilgrim tourism had on this zone. A friend of mine was posted there and the amount of dead bodies, debris and broken houses we saw, left me very disturbed. It was a very haunting experience. Post that the thought of how, as a consumer, we are impacting this planet was persistent in my mind. I bumped into a local person, a decorated army officer, who was working for Kedarnath restoration. Talking to him we realized that easy money has made people lose the relationship with their soil. People have left their age-old profession to make lodges and hotels. They began buying vehicles to cater to this unexpected tourism footfall in the name of pilgrimage. All this eventually led to a plan to create a model which differed from the conventional tourism model with a farming flavour. We zeroed down to a place called Nag Tibba which had one of the highest concentration of goats in an unorganized sector. That was the gap I saw and thought that I could probably create some pro-climate business model for villagers. From my chef and marketing profession experience, I knew for a fact that goat cheese is a gourmet product which is used by 5 start hotels. In India, it gets imported from Australia, New Zealand or Switzerland. I saw great potential in the Himalayan region to manufacture organic goat cheese. I visualised a great success story by marrying Himalaya with goat cheese.
THE HURDLES
As luck would have it, we learned that the goats weren't lactating in the region. The current generation was not interested in goat rearing or farming. Under the influence of social media, they all wanted to run away to the city to make a successful living. Hence, they picked up menial jobs in cities like driving taxis, selling vegetables, running tea stalls, etc. We thought we could source goat milk from other areas only to understand that the scenario was no different anywhere. Sadly, I realised that my research lacked the accuracy it required. At that stage I realised that Uttarakhand was highly concentrated with NGOs and they have spent money in crores from Banks time and again for the restoration of these areas. I spoke to the CEO of an NGO and we went back to the villages to understand why they attended trainings and never put the learnings into action. We understood that they went for the trainings to get away from their everyday life style, get a glimpse of the cities where these programmes were held. The giveaway T shirts, etc. were add on perks. At this point we realised that we were in trouble. We didn't want to deal with meat instead. We wanted villagers to realise that milk is a recurring income whilst meat is a one-time income. By this time, I had used up all my leaves, left my job and was put up in a tent. I was shattered at the thought that I had nothing to start with.
PAY-WHAT-YOU-LIKE AND THE GENESIS OF THE GOAT VILLAGE
I had come across a few volunteers who had trekked Nag Tibba. Nag Tibba is a trek which is the highest altitude pointing lower Himalaya and it is the lowest trek from Delhi and Chandigarh which are a good feeder market of travellers. It is the lowest trek but the place where we were located was the other side of the hill. To come there, you had to skirt about 2.5- 3 hours of extra hill to come there. Though the trek was popular, most people climbed on that trek from the Mussoorie side which is the conventional tourist destination. So, we were in this place with hardly any roads and practically in the middle of the forest. So, tourists came asking if they could stay there in the huts and we agreed. In return they would help with some construction work. The payment was up to them. We didn’t charge anything. Now, this pay-what-you-like concept went viral thanks to some of the tourists that visited us. A leading English newspaper ran a story on the front page about staying in traditional Himalayan homes with payment of your choice. After that, there was no looking back. We were flooded with calls. We also got visited by a lot of chefs and other people that I know. When they stayed with us, they highlighted about the richness of the food we got there. They pointed out the richness of the primitive form of seeds used in the high altitude small farm holdings. People were quitting the agriculture profession at an alarming rate. But, people staying back were still doing traditional farming. These 5 star hotel chefs gave us the idea to understand that these farm produce was something they would be willing to buy if we could supply. We had no idea about the FMCG domain. Also, the villagers were not receptive to the idea. They hadn’t learned to trust us completely yet. Gradually we built their trust. We revived a dying form of architecture called Koti Banal - a 1000 year old technique followed in certain parts of Himachal and Uttarakhand. Koti Banal architecture could endure many earthquakes, catastrophes etc. I don't come from any architectural background. But, common sense prevailed and we decided to try and revive the Koti Banal architecture. It was a Herculean task because the villagers themselves were making do with some hybrid kind of houses. But we kept trying. Travellers began giving feedback. Some architecture students from good colleges offered to help in reviving Koti Banal. Gradually, we created a test tube baby of a traditional village without any boundaries.
THE VOLUNTEER VILLAGE MANAGER PROGRAMME
Coming from the hospitality industry, I motivated some people to take up managerial jobs. They couldn't do justice to their roles;but, I decided to make it a very organic growth and evolution. We came up with this idea of Be-My-Volunteer-Village Manager. The volunteer had to live in the village for 3 months to train our village boys. The word spread out and we even got some ex-CEOs and ex-executives of some A-category organizations volunteering for the program. Some of these volunteers were in leadership positions with organisations such as Google, Uber, etc. They were able to add finesse and eventually we could give upmarket experience, without having either road or electricity.
In 3 years, we turned out to be a 54,000 footfall destination owing to our innovative destination marketing assets etc. Today, we are case studies in premium institutions thanks to our volunteers.
BAKRI CHHAP
Next, we thought of starting an FMCG brand to deal with those products which the chefs who visited us were interested in buying and which was being grown in that area. Hence, we came up with this brand called Bakri Chhap. We secured a digital weighing machine and sent the utility vehicle we secured for our construction work to the remote villages once or twice a week, thus, starting a mobile Mandi. The indigenous millets and pulses were the new rage. People were getting gluten intolerant and anti-wheat lobbies were being set up. The wave for vegan food couldn’t be ignored.
The Himalayan rag is more superior than oats; the barnyard millet is superior in quality to Quinoa; the Foxtail millet is one of the most potent millets you find on this earth; the Himalayan Amaranth is a powerhouse of energy; the pulses that are grown here can reverse a lot of lifestyle based diseases. When we understood the potential of the grains of the place, we connected with the farmers and expressed our interest in marketing their products. We wanted to ensure a recurring income for people around. With the creation of our Goat Village, people began breaking down their houses and rebuilding it to suit the new design. Thereby a trend of rebuilding old architecture set in. Though there were no trainings or workshops done, restoration happened. To tell you a little bit of the brand building. We are like a wild card entry in the social environmental rural space. We have two verticals - tourism and FMCG. To add to that we are an integrated rural development organisation. It was mostly NGOs, etc. that operated in this space. Our advent attracted visibility because initially by default and now by design we changed this whole brand personality to a more exciting, vibrant, colourful space. Technically we are operating for the under privileged section of the society, to protect the Himalayan ecology; but with a difference in attitude. And so, we wanted to showcase their products too with vibrancy and splendour. Hence, the use of humour. We made our marketing campaigns humorous. By now we realised that we are a creative marketing organisation with green hands. That was perhaps our only missing link from the rural ecosystem. Our packets state clearly that we are not organic and we never intend to make anything organic. Any end consumer is empowered to come and audit our farming process. They are welcome to stay in the homes of these farmers and pay what you like. Bakri Chhap indigenous millets, cereals, pulses and mono floral raw honey variants are also available online on Amazon India.
ORGANIC MARKETING
The tourists are our prop. Tourists generates carbon and is my one-time customer. If somebody loves my concept, he/she may come twice a year. India being a long-haul destination, a foreigner may come once in a lifetime. But, if someone is hooked on to the farm produce, there we have a recurring lifetime customer. Farming is a space that can employ multitudes. Also, indigenous farming is the right way to protect the planet, people and generate profit. So, right now we use tourism as a catalyst to propel the visibility of India's only marginalized farmers' brand, which is suggested by chefs and wellness experts. These responsible tourists are usually highly net savvy. They are opinion churners, who, most likely, they have their own virtual followers. They would talk to 100 other people and their opinion matters! Hence, we haven't spent money on advertising and marketing of BakhriChhap.
BAKRI SWAYAMWAR
To address the goat cheese issue, we came up with a concept called Bakri Swayamwar. We came to understand that the reason for lack of goat farming is that people don't take pride in being a goat herder. Even the richest goat herder would send his child to study at colleges in Dehra Dun, who in turn will be embarrassed to discuss his father’s profession with his friends. Also, the existing farmers do not exercise fodder intervention for their cattle and there was inbreeding due to which the goats stopped lactating. Inbreeding is a condition that arises when the goats are not segregated within their own gene pool and the flocks ended up interbreeding within the same gene pool which led to the deterioration of the breed. Hoping for a change, we came up with an idea of marrying goats. We conducted a socially appealing event, hoping to motivate people to get interested in their cattle breeding without rubbing it into them. Hence, the birth of Bakri Swayamvar. We picked up 3 best young goats from our own flock of goats and instructed our staff to treat them like queens. We named them and announced them to be royal daughters who had to be given away in marriage to the best male goats in town. We asked the villagers to get the best of their male goats. One female goat was left with 5 male goats and we had 3 judges. Whichever male goat won married my female goat. This is another case study at leading educational institutes about Perception Management Destination Marketing.
THE WAY FORWARD
There are more than 6,47,000 villages in India. Every village is on the brink of cultural or agricultural bankruptcy. This model is neither heavy in terms of investment nor is it an infrastructural demanding model. It is social engineering. So we plan to come out with a brand called Hideouts, which will be a village tourism brand across the country. Every village will have a unique tale to tell. So it is a scalable model. We can become the Oyo of Rural India. Unlike Oyo, we have a huge social equity and have learned the art of rural tourism. We have a lot of volunteers associated with us. So, we want to go national with this concept and use tourism to promote the agricultural and with that the cultural goodness of that particular ecosystem. As a result, every village will also develop as a collection centre/retail outlet/processing centre of Bakri Chhap. We are currently looking for like-minded partners to scale up and take the project across the country. We have organisations form Arunachal Pradesh (AP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP) approaching us. I want to work for the potters of UP. I would like to see a paradigm shift in the attitudes so as to protect our heritage, richness, culture and food. We aspire to connect the emotionally bankrupt urban segment to financially bankrupt rural segment.
Today, like at Bakri Chhap, we have lot many youngsters realizing and foreseeing the burnout within the corporate set up, coming into the agricultural industry with brilliant ideas. The positivity they hold, the flow of ideas and the heart to take risks without any preconceived notion is their forte. It's great to have people come up with such initiatives. We wish the entire Bakri Chhap team all the very best!
CONTACT: Roopesh Kumar Rai & Mani Mahesh
BakriChhap Natural Products Pvt Ltd., 21/10, EC Road,Dehradun -248001UttarakhandEmail manimahesharora@gmail.com
Mobile: 9068669531, 9870765758
He climbed the hills in search of goats to manufacture Himalayan goat cheese. Little did Mr Roopesh know that the higher altitudes had much more to offer him than goats’ milk.
Mr. Roopesh Rai, Founder and Managing Director at Green People talks about his journey, venture and future plans.
The IDEATION
I was a Director-Marketing for the Taj Group for quite some time and then I was doing business development for an international travel company. The Kedarnath catastrophe, which is considered the biggest catastrophe in India after Tsunami, was what drew me to this place. I was more of an inquisitive visitor as far as a travel expert is concerned. I wanted to understand what impact the pilgrim tourism had on this zone. A friend of mine was posted there and the amount of dead bodies, debris and broken houses we saw, left me very disturbed. It was a very haunting experience. Post that the thought of how, as a consumer, we are impacting this planet was persistent in my mind. I bumped into a local person, a decorated army officer, who was working for Kedarnath restoration. Talking to him we realized that easy money has made people lose the relationship with their soil. People have left their age-old profession to make lodges and hotels. They began buying vehicles to cater to this unexpected tourism footfall in the name of pilgrimage. All this eventually led to a plan to create a model which differed from the conventional tourism model with a farming flavour. We zeroed down to a place called Nag Tibba which had one of the highest concentration of goats in an unorganized sector. That was the gap I saw and thought that I could probably create some pro-climate business model for villagers. From my chef and marketing profession experience, I knew for a fact that goat cheese is a gourmet product which is used by 5 start hotels. In India, it gets imported from Australia, New Zealand or Switzerland. I saw great potential in the Himalayan region to manufacture organic goat cheese. I visualised a great success story by marrying Himalaya with goat cheese.
THE HURDLES
As luck would have it, we learned that the goats weren't lactating in the region. The current generation was not interested in goat rearing or farming. Under the influence of social media, they all wanted to run away to the city to make a successful living. Hence, they picked up menial jobs in cities like driving taxis, selling vegetables, running tea stalls, etc. We thought we could source goat milk from other areas only to understand that the scenario was no different anywhere. Sadly, I realised that my research lacked the accuracy it required. At that stage I realised that Uttarakhand was highly concentrated with NGOs and they have spent money in crores from Banks time and again for the restoration of these areas. I spoke to the CEO of an NGO and we went back to the villages to understand why they attended trainings and never put the learnings into action. We understood that they went for the trainings to get away from their everyday life style, get a glimpse of the cities where these programmes were held. The giveaway T shirts, etc. were add on perks. At this point we realised that we were in trouble. We didn't want to deal with meat instead. We wanted villagers to realise that milk is a recurring income whilst meat is a one-time income. By this time, I had used up all my leaves, left my job and was put up in a tent. I was shattered at the thought that I had nothing to start with.
PAY-WHAT-YOU-LIKE AND THE GENESIS OF THE GOAT VILLAGE
I had come across a few volunteers who had trekked Nag Tibba. Nag Tibba is a trek which is the highest altitude pointing lower Himalaya and it is the lowest trek from Delhi and Chandigarh which are a good feeder market of travellers. It is the lowest trek but the place where we were located was the other side of the hill. To come there, you had to skirt about 2.5- 3 hours of extra hill to come there. Though the trek was popular, most people climbed on that trek from the Mussoorie side which is the conventional tourist destination. So, we were in this place with hardly any roads and practically in the middle of the forest. So, tourists came asking if they could stay there in the huts and we agreed. In return they would help with some construction work. The payment was up to them. We didn’t charge anything. Now, this pay-what-you-like concept went viral thanks to some of the tourists that visited us. A leading English newspaper ran a story on the front page about staying in traditional Himalayan homes with payment of your choice. After that, there was no looking back. We were flooded with calls. We also got visited by a lot of chefs and other people that I know. When they stayed with us, they highlighted about the richness of the food we got there. They pointed out the richness of the primitive form of seeds used in the high altitude small farm holdings. People were quitting the agriculture profession at an alarming rate. But, people staying back were still doing traditional farming. These 5 star hotel chefs gave us the idea to understand that these farm produce was something they would be willing to buy if we could supply. We had no idea about the FMCG domain. Also, the villagers were not receptive to the idea. They hadn’t learned to trust us completely yet. Gradually we built their trust. We revived a dying form of architecture called Koti Banal - a 1000 year old technique followed in certain parts of Himachal and Uttarakhand. Koti Banal architecture could endure many earthquakes, catastrophes etc. I don't come from any architectural background. But, common sense prevailed and we decided to try and revive the Koti Banal architecture. It was a Herculean task because the villagers themselves were making do with some hybrid kind of houses. But we kept trying. Travellers began giving feedback. Some architecture students from good colleges offered to help in reviving Koti Banal. Gradually, we created a test tube baby of a traditional village without any boundaries.
THE VOLUNTEER VILLAGE MANAGER PROGRAMME
Coming from the hospitality industry, I motivated some people to take up managerial jobs. They couldn't do justice to their roles;but, I decided to make it a very organic growth and evolution. We came up with this idea of Be-My-Volunteer-Village Manager. The volunteer had to live in the village for 3 months to train our village boys. The word spread out and we even got some ex-CEOs and ex-executives of some A-category organizations volunteering for the program. Some of these volunteers were in leadership positions with organisations such as Google, Uber, etc. They were able to add finesse and eventually we could give upmarket experience, without having either road or electricity.
In 3 years, we turned out to be a 54,000 footfall destination owing to our innovative destination marketing assets etc. Today, we are case studies in premium institutions thanks to our volunteers.
BAKRI CHHAP
Next, we thought of starting an FMCG brand to deal with those products which the chefs who visited us were interested in buying and which was being grown in that area. Hence, we came up with this brand called Bakri Chhap. We secured a digital weighing machine and sent the utility vehicle we secured for our construction work to the remote villages once or twice a week, thus, starting a mobile Mandi. The indigenous millets and pulses were the new rage. People were getting gluten intolerant and anti-wheat lobbies were being set up. The wave for vegan food couldn’t be ignored.
The Himalayan rag is more superior than oats; the barnyard millet is superior in quality to Quinoa; the Foxtail millet is one of the most potent millets you find on this earth; the Himalayan Amaranth is a powerhouse of energy; the pulses that are grown here can reverse a lot of lifestyle based diseases. When we understood the potential of the grains of the place, we connected with the farmers and expressed our interest in marketing their products. We wanted to ensure a recurring income for people around. With the creation of our Goat Village, people began breaking down their houses and rebuilding it to suit the new design. Thereby a trend of rebuilding old architecture set in. Though there were no trainings or workshops done, restoration happened. To tell you a little bit of the brand building. We are like a wild card entry in the social environmental rural space. We have two verticals - tourism and FMCG. To add to that we are an integrated rural development organisation. It was mostly NGOs, etc. that operated in this space. Our advent attracted visibility because initially by default and now by design we changed this whole brand personality to a more exciting, vibrant, colourful space. Technically we are operating for the under privileged section of the society, to protect the Himalayan ecology; but with a difference in attitude. And so, we wanted to showcase their products too with vibrancy and splendour. Hence, the use of humour. We made our marketing campaigns humorous. By now we realised that we are a creative marketing organisation with green hands. That was perhaps our only missing link from the rural ecosystem. Our packets state clearly that we are not organic and we never intend to make anything organic. Any end consumer is empowered to come and audit our farming process. They are welcome to stay in the homes of these farmers and pay what you like. Bakri Chhap indigenous millets, cereals, pulses and mono floral raw honey variants are also available online on Amazon India.
ORGANIC MARKETING
The tourists are our prop. Tourists generates carbon and is my one-time customer. If somebody loves my concept, he/she may come twice a year. India being a long-haul destination, a foreigner may come once in a lifetime. But, if someone is hooked on to the farm produce, there we have a recurring lifetime customer. Farming is a space that can employ multitudes. Also, indigenous farming is the right way to protect the planet, people and generate profit. So, right now we use tourism as a catalyst to propel the visibility of India's only marginalized farmers' brand, which is suggested by chefs and wellness experts. These responsible tourists are usually highly net savvy. They are opinion churners, who, most likely, they have their own virtual followers. They would talk to 100 other people and their opinion matters! Hence, we haven't spent money on advertising and marketing of BakhriChhap.
BAKRI SWAYAMWAR
To address the goat cheese issue, we came up with a concept called Bakri Swayamwar. We came to understand that the reason for lack of goat farming is that people don't take pride in being a goat herder. Even the richest goat herder would send his child to study at colleges in Dehra Dun, who in turn will be embarrassed to discuss his father’s profession with his friends. Also, the existing farmers do not exercise fodder intervention for their cattle and there was inbreeding due to which the goats stopped lactating. Inbreeding is a condition that arises when the goats are not segregated within their own gene pool and the flocks ended up interbreeding within the same gene pool which led to the deterioration of the breed. Hoping for a change, we came up with an idea of marrying goats. We conducted a socially appealing event, hoping to motivate people to get interested in their cattle breeding without rubbing it into them. Hence, the birth of Bakri Swayamvar. We picked up 3 best young goats from our own flock of goats and instructed our staff to treat them like queens. We named them and announced them to be royal daughters who had to be given away in marriage to the best male goats in town. We asked the villagers to get the best of their male goats. One female goat was left with 5 male goats and we had 3 judges. Whichever male goat won married my female goat. This is another case study at leading educational institutes about Perception Management Destination Marketing.
THE WAY FORWARD
There are more than 6,47,000 villages in India. Every village is on the brink of cultural or agricultural bankruptcy. This model is neither heavy in terms of investment nor is it an infrastructural demanding model. It is social engineering. So we plan to come out with a brand called Hideouts, which will be a village tourism brand across the country. Every village will have a unique tale to tell. So it is a scalable model. We can become the Oyo of Rural India. Unlike Oyo, we have a huge social equity and have learned the art of rural tourism. We have a lot of volunteers associated with us. So, we want to go national with this concept and use tourism to promote the agricultural and with that the cultural goodness of that particular ecosystem. As a result, every village will also develop as a collection centre/retail outlet/processing centre of Bakri Chhap. We are currently looking for like-minded partners to scale up and take the project across the country. We have organisations form Arunachal Pradesh (AP) and Madhya Pradesh (MP) approaching us. I want to work for the potters of UP. I would like to see a paradigm shift in the attitudes so as to protect our heritage, richness, culture and food. We aspire to connect the emotionally bankrupt urban segment to financially bankrupt rural segment.
Today, like at Bakri Chhap, we have lot many youngsters realizing and foreseeing the burnout within the corporate set up, coming into the agricultural industry with brilliant ideas. The positivity they hold, the flow of ideas and the heart to take risks without any preconceived notion is their forte. It's great to have people come up with such initiatives. We wish the entire Bakri Chhap team all the very best!
CONTACT: Roopesh Kumar Rai & Mani Mahesh
BakriChhap Natural Products Pvt Ltd., 21/10, EC Road,Dehradun -248001UttarakhandEmail manimahesharora@gmail.com
Mobile: 9068669531, 9870765758
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