Pravesh Sharma studied at Delhi University before cracking UPSC.
Pravesh Sharma took a voluntary retirement in 2016 from his IAS duties and started selling vegetables in Delhi’s Dwarka region.
The Union Public Service Commission or UPSC is one of the toughest and most prestigious examinations in India. However, this story of an ex-bureaucrat is doing the rounds on social media for a completely different reason.
Pravesh Sharma was a 1982-batch Madhya Pradesh cadre IAS officer, who served the country for 34 long years before taking voluntary retirement in 2016. After leaving the prestigious job, he started his own entrepreneurial startup named Sabziwala dealing with the delivery of fresh vegetables and fruits in and around Delhi. As per YourStory, Sabziwala started as an online ordering app and eventually became a medium for people to go to their nearest Kirana stores to get fresh vegetables at a fair price without the hassle of bargaining. It acted as a proper channel of fresh greens between the farmers and the consumers.
“I wanted to create an enterprise around agriculture to demonstrate it can be viable, inclusive, sustainable and scalable. I chose fruits and vegetables because this is the most fragmented value chain,” said Pravesh Sharma in his interview with YourStory.
It was observed that Sharma’s Sabziwala procures two-thirds of the produce from farmers’ organizations based in Panipat, Agra, Indore, Nashik and Ramda. “There is no displacing anybody, no investment in malls and supermarkets,” explained Sharma how the process is efficient and doesn’t harm any farmer’s livelihood.
Having pursued history at Delhi University, Sharma previously held roles as Madhya Pradesh’s agriculture secretary and India’s representative for the International Fund for Agricultural Development. He also served as the managing director of the Small Farmers’ Agri-business Consortium (SFAC) for a five-year term.
After the initial success of Sabziwala, Sharma expanded it in 2018 with the name of Kamatan Farm Tech Pvt Ltd. to work as an organization of farmer-producers.
