The Better India · 6 hours ago

After Farmer Suicides, Engineer Left Us to Help Farmers Earn with Mobile Mandis

When news of farmer suicides in India reached Ramesh Biswal during his post-doctoral studies in the US, the statistics felt unbearably personal -- his own father was a farmer. The IIT-Kharagpur engineer left his American career in 2016 to return to Odisha, where he transformed vans into mobile marketplaces that now travel through 110 villages, buying produce directly from farmers at 30-50 percent above minimum support price and selling it the next day in neighboring communities. "If I had chosen to continue working in the US -- while in my hometown farmers were suffering -- I wouldn't be using my knowledge for a good cause," he reflects, his Villa Mart now connecting over 3,000 farmers who no longer walk miles to uncertain markets or watch their harvests rot unsold. What began as one engineer's reckoning with distance and duty has become a system where farmers are paid immediately, their labor honored in real time rather than lost to a broken supply chain.