Hydroponics, the urban face of Agriculture 2.0

Hunger and water scarcity are but two sides of the same coin, both in urban India as well as in farming communities depleting their reserves of arable land. We desperately need for traditional practices of soil-based agriculture to be complemented by more productive and ecologically-sustainable forms of modern agriculture. These modern practices need to be cognizant of our modern day challenges of de-forestation, overly complex distribution of perishables, overuse of water for irrigation, excessive use of transportation fuels, and the rising menace of food price inflation.

Making Innovation Contagious

Utopia in the developmental world can be visualized as the existence of a vast array of 'copy, tailor and paste' programs, where sustainable social innovations are being massively replicated across low-income communities, and the capital markets are seeing enough opportunity to trade in the sector. What would drive this ability to scale though would be an abundance of openly-available success stories and lessons learned. And what would allow for such successes in the first place would be a relentless focus on collaboration, as opposed to competition, by social entrepreneurs and their sponsors. Collaboration in specifics is the essence of what will scale social impact, and set it apart from the purely commercial world that is obsessed with capturing value primarily for shareholders.