UTTAR PRADESH: His background in chemical engineering and real-life exposure to agriculture – his father is a farmer – were the right blend as he would discover later. Meet Akshay Shrivastava of Kushinagar, a far eastern district of Uttar Pradesh. In his mid-20s now, he was witness to his father’s hardships in the field, which led him to develop a bio-fertiliser on his own.
It is not only easy on the soil and cheaper than the chemical substitutes, but also has the potential to increase the yield by 15-40 per cent. As the bio-fertiliser, which he named ‘Navyakosh’, meaning ‘A novel wealth’, reaching farmers across the region, accolades from all quarters too came his way, including the state government which conferred an award on him.
While growing up, Akshay saw his father struggling with a host of issues related to agriculture – poor irrigation facility, rising production costs and ill effects of chemical fertilizers on soil health and low yield. An environmentally-conscious teen, he discussed the impact of chemical fertilizers on pollution levels in the soil and how its quality deteriorated because of the reduction in water-retention capacity.
Chemical engineering was the obvious choice when he embarked on higher education. His goal was not a high-paying cushioned job, but following his passion to improve the lot of his father and lakhs of others like him.
“My thought behind joining chemical engineering was to have a deeper and scientific understanding of the subject so that I could make my dream of helping farmers come true,” Akshay says.
For this, the 23-year-old has innovated a bio-fertiliser that, he says, can help increase agricultural productivity by 35 per cent, helping over 3,000 farmers across India.
He started working on his plan when he was in the second year of his engineering college. But the college lacked the infrastructure for advanced research. He travelled to different renowned institutes of the state, including IIT-Kanpur, to give the finishing touches to his prototype.
He also visited sugar and alcohol factories to learn how to produce the product commercially and market it.
Finally, in August 2020, Akshay achieved what he had dreamt about. It was a ready-to-use bio-fertiliser using 60 types of microbes. “These microbes are capable of enhancing nine types of nutrients including potassium, nitrogen, zinc, and carbon,” he says.
Akshay got the stamp from approval from the National Accreditation Board for Testing and Calibration Laboratories (NABL) where he had sent 2 kg samples of his bio-fertilizer for lab testing. Besides, the ground trials showed that the use of his product substantially improved crop yield. Six years of hard work had paid off well.
Another product that he developed was a super absorbent granule that holds water 300 times its weight and releases it slowly. It includes nanoparticles that speed up biomass decomposition and increase microbial activity in the soil.
A NABL report confirms that the combination of his two products increases yield by 15-40 per cent depending on the soil health and reduces irrigation needs by 33 per cent.
Armed with a certificate from the country’s top-most accreditation body, he set up his startup in March 2021 for mass production of his biofertilizer and granules.
Subsequently, getting popular in local media, Akshay started getting orders from
far and wide. He applied for grants from the government start-up funding schemes and set up his manufacturing unit.
At present, the production capacity of his unit is 10 tonnes a month, but his monthly order inventory is as big as 25 tonnes. Now, he is ready to meet the next challenge: scaling up.