Deodhar couple started 'Sonkan' with the idea of making life better for villagers in Konkan. And built a successful company along the way

In Tetavali village, a five-hour drive 180 km from Pune, where traditional millets were once grown in every field, change had quietly crept in.

- Namita Shibad

PUNE: Most of the youths in the village had migrated to nearby cities for jobs, and those who stayed back were cultivating only rice and had forgotten about the legacy of millet farming.

Nitin Deodhar, 59, and his wife Meenakshi, 58, who visited the village quite often, saw both a crisis and an opportunity here. This gave birth to Sonkan in 2021, a startup that sells nutritious and wholesome millet-based foods, and other products of Konkan.

How it started Nitin, who was at the time running a very successful MEP (Mechanical, Electrical Plumbing) Consultancy offering services across the globe, said, "Our family roots are in Konkan and we'd go there regularly, and, on our trips, we saw that the locals were leaving the village to work in cities.

"The bright students would go to the cities to get jobs as clerks, and delivery men while the not-so-bright students would stay back to tend to the farm. In addition to this, their dietary habits were changing. Instead of eating what was over generations produced by their farms, they were switching to government-provided rice and wheat that came from ration shops and came with its own economic pitfalls."

Nitin and Meenakshi found this very disturbing. Says Nitin, "The area traditionally would grow millets — the hardy crop. Hardy because it could withstand a drought as well as flood excess rainfall situations. Besides being a hardy crop, it was grown in the sloping wastelands of Konkan.

"However, falling prey to the ongoing trends, the villagers of Konkan shifted to growing only rice and giving up ragi (finger millet) and varai (barnyard millet) which need very little tending. This was also changing their food habits. This not only affected their earnings but also impacted their health."