Shashank Kumar

He was born in Chapra - a small town of Bihar, India and raised in a lower-middle-class family. His father is a retired Grade 3 government officer in Bihar State Electricity Board and his mother was teacher in a government school. After completing his basic schooling from Netarhat Residential School, Jharkhand, he went to IIT Delhi for his undergraduate studies in Textile Engineering and graduated in 2008. He also completed his minor MBA degree from Department of Management & Studies, IIT Delhi in 2008.

After he graduated from IIT Delhi in 2008, he joined a management consulting firm Beacon Advisory Services where he worked as an Associate for two and a half years. His working area was supply chain, retail and FMCG sectors. He worked for leading FMCG companies for their problems related to secondary distribution network; Price elasticity & Continuous replenish system.

He along with his old friend Manish Kumar from IIT Kharagpur started a not for profit society Farms and Farmers (FnF) Foundation in 2011 with an aim of maximizing profit per unit area of small & marginal farmers of India. He started his work from his home state - Bihar, India. Under his leadership, FnF could set up an excellent team of people from IIT Kharagpur, IIM Ahmedabad, NIT Jamshedpur, ISM Dhanbad & FnF won many awards such as Mahindra Spark The Rise, Jain-INCID for its work on micro irrigation in Bihar, India. FnF got initial support from NABARD under Rural Innovation Fund (RIF) and UPNRPM. In a span of 5 years, FnF made its national and global entity for conceptualizing and implementing the concept of rural entrepreneurship in agriculture and offering end to end agricultural services to small farmers. FnF also encourages farmers to build a community owned institution as Farmer Producer Organization (FPO). His work at FnF got featured by many leading media group - Times of India,[1] ET, HT, CNN-IBN and many more. In 2014, FnF got awarded by DFID under the Millennium Alliance initiative of FICCI and got funded to work in other south Asian developing country- Nepal. He resigned as president of FnF in financial year 2015–16 when leadership role of FnF was handed over to Shyam Sundar Singh (IIT Kharagpur & IIM Ahmedabad) & Sonu Kumar Adarsh (ISM Dhanbad).

While working as president of Farms & Farmers (FnF) Foundation, he felt the need of technology to build a scalable working model to improve efficiency and transparency in Agricultural value chain. In 2012, he co-founded a social enterprise, Green Agrevolution and developed a technology driven model of last mile delivery of farming services - DeHaat. DeHaat is a mobile based technology which connects small farmers to their 360 degree of agricultural requirement – seed to market. Android version of DeHaat is used by local micro entrepreneurs, farmers group and farmer producer organization (FPO) to offer various services to local farmers in a sustainable way. Each unit DeHaat caters to 1000 farmers in catchment area of 6–7 km. It brings services such as wide range of agricultural inputs (seed, fertilizers, crop protection), customized crop advisory and market linkage of farm produce under one roof. Small farmers get the access to services from DeHaat at cost of INR 200 per farmer per year.

He along with other co-founder, Amrendra Singh ( Computer Engineer, NIT Jamshedpur) led his team for many milestones such as winning Vodafone Foundation “Mobile for Good” in 2015,[2] Eureka at IIT Bombay in 2013, Tata Social Enterprise Competition at IIM Calcutta in 2014, Action for India in 2015. DeHaat got featured by Business outlook among top 20 social business innovation in 2014.[3] While working with 10,000+ farmers in Bihar, U.P. & Odisha, DeHaat also got featured by Yourstory in 2015. He has been invited to many institute like IIT Kharagpur, IIT Kanpur, XLRI, IIM Lucknow, IIT Patna [4] to speak on entrepreneurship & to motivate youth to come into agriculture sector.

He is married to Mailinie an IIT Delhi alum who is AVP with a consulting firm, EXL Service. They have one daughter.

He was awarded with Ashoka Fellowship in 2013 as a global changemaker.[5] Honorable CM, Bihar Shri Nitish Kumar awarded him as the Social Entrepreneur of the Year, Bihar in 2012–13. NABARD, ISB & PARFI awarded him as leading social entrepreneur in 2013. In 2014, he got featured by Forbes India magazine as Forbes 30 Under 30.[6] He was also featured as Amazing Indian by Times Now in 2014. He had also received Role of Honour award during his IIT life in 2008.

He presented DeHaat technology to PM, Rwanda in Delhi in 2015 at Indo-Africa technology summit. He accompanied PM India & FICCI delegation to Kenya in 2016 to present DeHaat technology. He was invited to Tanzania by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to participate for deriving efficient model of agricultural extension in 2015. He was also invited to TiECon silicon valley in 2016 as TiECon speaker [7]

• Official Website : Farms N Farmers
• Official Website : Green Agrevolution Pvt Ltd