This is the life-changing story of Roopesh Rai, Founder and Director, Green People who owns The Goat Village homestays and the Bakri Chhap organic products brand in Uttarakhand.
A farmer at soul, chef by heart and a Brand Engineer for a living, Roopesh is known for ‘many firsts’ in the hospitality and tourism industry. Having worked with Intercontinental hotels, Taj group of hotels and Thomas Cook in senior sales and marketing positions, Roopesh was happy with his career, before an event three months post the Kedarnath catastrophe, changed his life forever! A trip to Kedarnath just a while after the Himalayan tsunami catastrophe led him to a forgotten village of Uttarakhand that was abandoned 25 years ago.
His journey for rebuilding the village and setting up Green People, was fraught with many challenges. He recalls, “The biggest challenge was the trust deficit of the people. After going through perpetual experience of natural as well as political calamities, the villagers had lost their ability to trust anyone. To make matters worse, with the introduction of television and social media, they had a dangerous sense of inadequacy and felt anything urban or English was superior – the Digital Divide.”
Roopesh quickly realised that the issue was not lack of opportunity but lack of self esteem. “We observed that higher the altitude, the lower will be the self esteem. So instead of working upon building walls, we built the relationships with the villagers. In short, rather than infrastructure engineering, we focused on social engineering.
Connecting marginalised Himalayan farmers
Green People is a for-profit impact organisation working towards integrated rural development via two channels namely ‘The Goat Village’ ( https://theorganicmagazine.com/organic/the-goat-village-live-a-shepherds-life/) and ‘Bakri Chhap’. (Bakri is Goat in Hindi). The former promotes farm retreats/homestays and is reviving abandoned villages by leveraging their tourism potential and the latter by providing market linkage to indigenous farm produce from the marginalised farmers’ community.
Green People is working towards holistic rural development and reverse-migration of marginalised Himalayan farmers by providing them ecologically sustainable & long-term engagements through rural tourism, agriculture & related pursuits, and bridging the socio-cultural & economic gap between rural and urban India.
Why use the Goat to symbolise his brands?
Roopesh explains, “The vision is to protect the heritage, culture, agriculture, & horticulture of Small, Micro and Marginalised Farmers (SMMF) of rural India, Himalayas to begin with. The livestock which is the goat and sheep is an intrinsic part of their livelihood of SMMF in the Himalayas. Also, while there is a lot of activism related to the top of the food chain for mammals like elephants and tigers, we seldom realise that unless the bottom of the pyramid of Biodiversity is protected, we will not be able to accomplish the goal of biodiversity and cultural diversity protection.”
Roopesh believes that if goats are promoted, a SMMF is protected, and if such communities are protected, the forest cover and natural water resources will automatically be protected as they are the immediate custodians of such ecosystems. Hence the over-hyped endangered species like tigers will be protected by default. “So instead of glamourising SMMF, we thought, what could be better than the Goat being our brand ambassador/ mascot,” he points out.
A fair price
Bakri Chhap Natural Produce comes directly from the farmers who are on the verge of leaving agriculture due to the fact that they have not been getting good prices for their produce. This happens mainly because of too many middlemen between the actual producer and final consumer.
Roopesh adds, “At Bakri Chhap, we work with nearly 150 farmers directly & 500+ farmers indirectly across 45+ villages and have striven to provide fair trade prices by eliminating middlemen and providing quality produce to leading retail stores, e-commerce and upscale hotels in India. We are also working in close co-branding and marketing collaborations with volunteer celebrity chefs, wellness experts & bloggers from metropolitan cities.”
The quality and traceability is maintained through regular and consistent skill-development and training of villagers, largely women, running and operating the collection and processing units of Bakri Chhap. Roopesh shares that his team has also created a process of regular mystery audits through volunteers which is helping maintain quality and traceability. He adds, “We also have a direct consumer feedback and rating mechanism which is part of our quality-control SOPs. These plug and play processes are also helping us scale-out our brand to other rural parts of India through direct collaborations with individuals, NGOs and self-help groups working in the villages in the same space.”
The brand has two taglines: Chote Kisano ka Bada Brand, Bakri Chhap and Organic Ka Baap, Bakri Chhap, reflecting its ethos and vision. Commenting on organic certification, Roopesh feels that typically, the marginal farmers are forced to sell at low rates because once they reach the Mandi, they need to off-load their produce at whatever best rates they can garner on that very day. “At Green People, the collection centers are at the doorstep of marginal farmers – weeding out middlemen from the food supply chain management to a large scale. The model has already created successful Peer to Peer relationships between farmers and bulk hotel users,” he says.
To be or not to be
Roopesh also opines that Natural, is perhaps better than organic. There are still many villages in rural India that grow their crops in a traditional way using natural ingredients. “These produce that are grown in the pristine climate of villages, free from pollution and chemicals are perhaps even better than merely being organic. However, they are not “certified organic”. Not yet. These farmers would require education, skilling and mandatory paper-work to be stamped Organic,” he believes. Some of the Bakri Chhap products like Hearty Sip, Red Rajma, Lal Baat (Red Rice) are ingeniously packaged in recycled Coke and Pepsi bottles.
Bakri Chhap believes that the gradual journey of these micro farmers towards organic certification will not start with a new-technology laboratory test but with the re-establishment of their faith in their own centuries old traditional craft. By and large, their produce is naturally loaded with antioxidants and minerals; owing to the location of fields, manual farming and perennial sources of natural irrigation. “Yet, there is no reason why this largely organic, natural product should not get a premium for what it already is. Bakri Chhap is the precursor (or call it predecessor – therefore baap) to Organic,” Roopesh reiterates.
Sharing his insights on the sustainable product market in India and how Covid 19 has impacted it, Roopesh observes that before Covid-19, sustainability was a niche but post-Covid-19 it is bound to become a norm. “We also believe that fair trade is the key to sustainability in terms of agriculture. Example: People spent most of their money on groceries, edible and related products and this forced transition made people develop a sense of what they are eating and how they are eating. We have to tell our kids that food is not grown by big e-commerce companies. It can’t be grown by a few clicks or a tap on the smartphone. It has to be grown through sustainable agriculture practices with the right intentions,” he emphasises.
An integrated platform for SMMF
Instead of creating a plain tourism entity or a uni-dimensional FMCG entity, Green People focused on creating an ‘integrated rural development’ model aiming at holistic development of villages with Reduce, Recycle and Reuse being the core guiding principles. “Our home-stay units under the brands The Goat Villages & The Hideouts double up as collection, processing, packaging and retail centres for Bakri Chhap. The supply chain consists of using public transportation and courier services,” informs Roopesh. Currently, Bakri Chhap products are not being exported but they are working towards it.
Future plans include an expansion through a unique franchise model where rather than creating its own facility at different locations, it would collaborate with self-help groups and cooperatives operating in rural India and will train them to grade, sort and package. “Quality control and labelling would be provided by us. We would like to position ourselves as an integrated platform for Small Micro Marginalised Farmers of India,” Roopesh concludes.
