Athang Jain’s litmus test

Athang Jain isn’t used to being the centre of attention. Even when he visits the food processing plant that is a subsidiary of his familyowned company Jain Irrigation Systems (JISL), some of the global’s largest micro-irrigation firms, the employees pay little attention to their boss.

Wearing the legislation white coat and cap, Jain climbs as much as the bridge the place an assembly-line of mangoes is rolling along, ready to be peeled, pulped and bagged. Even regardless that he is best there for a photograph shoot, Jain reaches over and, like the remainder of the team, starts to examine the mangoes for dents and firmness.

It’s a gesture that claims so much about the director of Jain Farm Fresh Foods, whose operations revolve round this plant: Athang is hands-on, thorough and never truly stops running. “You don’t have any ‘off’ days,” Jain, 26, says over a sattvic breakfast. “We continue to exist campus so we’re always in administrative center.” Jain, who got married a yr ago, agreed to the organized match because “she had to be someone from a similar, business-family background who would keep in mind that I’m always going to be running”.

Jain Irrigation has a turnover of greater than $1 billion. The hugely-diversified workforce operates out of a 1,300-acre campus in Jalgaon that homes its micro-irrigation and green energy divisions; food and spices processing vegetation; a plant tissue culture laboratory; agri-tech centres, greenhouses and a pipes division, among others. And the Jains’ kin home. Athang and his spouse live together with his oldsters and siblings; his father’s three brothers, and their households.

There are about 17 other folks beneath one roof. One imagines mealtimes must be like a Sooraj Barjatya movie.

It could be easy to get misplaced in a kin that enormous, but the highlight is firmly on the soft-spoken and unassuming Athang. As the eldest in GenNext, he's going to quickly run the corporate his grandfather, Bhavarlal Jain, founded. Jain Senior knew this and began training him early. “Ever since I was one, I have been sound asleep in my grandfather’s room,” says Jain.

“That’s when the grooming began. I would go for morning walks with him and learn more about our work.” School vacations — Athang studied at Rishi Valley High School in Andhra Pradesh, and later at St Xavier’s College in Mumbai — have been spent sitting in Bhavarlal’s administrative center, watching him habits business. In 2013, when Athang was in a position to join the company, Bhavarlal created an exhaustive, two-year training programme, right down to the day. “It was designed in order that I would sit with different other folks on different days, shadow some of them, and ask my very own questions,” says Jain. “I also needed to work on the various vegetation we owned in India and out of the country. I worked on the shop flooring and operated machines.” Bhavarlal, who couldn’t spend much time together with his 4 sons while building the business, was determined to compensate together with his eight grandchildren.

Bhavarlal, who kicked the bucket in 2016, began out as a PVC pipes supplier-turnedmanufacturer within the 1960s, and moved into micro-irrigation within the 1980s, after he noticed the methodology at an excellent in Fresno, California.

He then designed smaller, more compact drip irrigation methods for farmers in Jalgaon and Maharashtra with small holdings. Drip or micro-irrigation is a water conservation methodology in agriculture during which best the roots of the crop get watered. “Only five per cent of India’s farmers use drip irrigation,” says Dr DN Kulkarni, President, Agriculture and Food at JISL. “About 95 per cent nonetheless wish to flood their fields. They don’t realise that not best is this useless, in these times of water scarcity, it's highly inefficient.” Bhavarlal’s remodelled system worked so nicely in Jalgaon that the corporate now has a network of 5 million farmers around the south and west of India who use JISL’s technologies.

“Indian has 120 million farmers,” says Athang. “We’ve best been ready to touch a fraction of that.” When the Jalgaon farmers who had followed drip irrigation noticed their fruit and vegetable crops treble, JISL decided to buy back their produce (thru a contract farming association), and embarked on its food and fruit-processing ventures in 1996.

“The credit score for the corporate’s extraordinary growth is going to Bhavarlal Jain’s missionary zeal to work with farmers,” says Abhijit Joshi, senior vicepresident of product building and technical services and products. “He didn’t simply want to promote a product; he wanted to ensure the farmer earned more and turned into filthy rich.” That philosophy and zeal, says managing director Anil Jain, Athang’s father, has been handed right down to the grand youngsters, beginning with Athang. Today, JISL is a one-stop shop for farmers, offering them with knowhow, training, equipment and now even finances thru a subsidiary non-banking corporation.

Athang is within the technique of incomes his stripes with a major play for the corporate. In 2015, when Anil Jain asked him to take in a mission inside the workforce, Athang selected shopper retail – a move that indicators an important shift from the crowd’s very nature of work. JISL has principally been within the B2B (business to business) section, offering uncooked elements to MNCs, like mango pulp to Coca-Cola for Maaza.

Under Athang, JISL has begun to manufacture and retail shopper merchandise beneath its Farm Fresh label: fruit snacks, juices, frozen pulp and – quickly --spices. “Jain Irrigation is an industrial and agro-irrigation company,” says Athang. “We needed to achieve a more modern, shopper mindset. Today, there are lots of players within the B2B section, but what's going to give us higher margins is to create a client attach.

We will use our strengths as a manufacturer to turn out to be more focussed on advertising and marketing and retailing our own merchandise.” The problem was to determine which – out of Jain Irrigation’s massive choice of uncooked merchandise – may go directly to the marketplace with out competing with its B2B shoppers.

It’s not easy for scions of wellestablished business households to get a buyin from their seniors to do one thing new, says Professor Rajiv Agarwal, who heads the Family Business and Strategy programme on the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. “The first problem is to hold on with the kin manner of doing business, particularly if it has been successful,” says Agarwal. “You don’t want to upset the applecart. The second is to search out new, viable earnings streams and growth alternatives. It takes a lot of courage to say, ‘let’s look at the future for what we will be able to do the next day to come, quite than persist with what made us successful the day past’. There is super kin drive for the brand new generation to continue within the tradition of the old guard.”

Athang’s sister Amoli, who joined JISL in October, believes her brother can pull it off. “More than any folks, it's Athang who has in point of fact grown up with the business,” she says.

For Athang, it’s a solution to put the kin company on the map. “Most other folks dwelling within the city wouldn’t have heard of Jain Irrigation,” says Athang, who finished his post-graduation in control and strategy from the London School of Economics. “What my generation brings to the business may be a solution to marketplace JISL and feature the arena recognise our merchandise.” His father is of the same opinion. “The youngsters have a finger on the pulse of the Millennials.

Millennials may not have much emblem loyalty, but they're particular about the antecedents in their food and its well being quotient.” That’s why Athang has pushed for 100 per cent natural items, with out a added sugar, colors or preservatives.

He is well-aware that retail is his litmus check. But then, JISL’s good fortune has been predicated on its ability to innovate over time. In a newer building, it has followed using IoT in farming ways. A brand new centralised controller — operated remotely thru a hand held software — lets in farmers, it doesn't matter what the dimensions in their holdings, to keep an eye on, with precision, the quantity of water and fertiliser discharged into their fields and orchards. Logging onto the information superhighway, the farmers can get more data about soil and weather prerequisites or perfect agricultural practices, from a JISL-run hub which invites agronomists from all over the place the arena to proportion their expertise. The IoT thrust has in large part come from Athang’s uncle and Joint Managing Director Ajit Jain, a mechanical engineer, but the former also inputs significantly in it. “It is a function in their generation,” says Ajit, whose son Abhedya has also not too long ago come on board. “They are so a lot more plugged into internet-related things that they're going to easily have the ability to move us to the following level of tech.”

“Our company has always evolved in reaction to what is taking place available on the market,” says Anil Jain. But being tucked away in Jalgaon, a ways from the public eye, has not helped to tell the JISL tale — even to current and potential buyers. That’s why Athang has also undertaken a strong rebranding and ‘visibility’ force. “The first thing I did was exchange our web page completely,” says Jain. “It is the face of the corporate, but no person had stricken with its glance.

We also had very poor social media presence because the argument was that our number one stakeholders, the farmers, are not on it. But we need to tell our tale to buyers and likewise to farmers who will in the end get on social media.”

Jain believes the things the corporate is doing — like looking to set up a microirrigation mission in Ladakh, at 3,000 metres above sea level — also need to be broadcast in order that JISL’s staff (who're known as ‘sahakaris’ or mates), can even take pride of their organisation.