The speaker for the event was Mr Vickram Kumar, MBA (Rural Management), 2011-13 batch. He completed his BBA in marketing and finance from KIIT School of Management. He also pursued masters in rural sociology from Mohanlal Sukhadia University in 2016. Mr. Vickram is an agriculture value chain expert with a decade of experience working in various regions of India in managing different projects and stakeholders. His expertise includes value chain development program creation, agriculture entrepreneurship development, agri-finance, business innovation, and piloting new technologies. He has also worked as a consultant to governmental and non-governmental organizations in agriculture-based livelihood, skills development, and aligning technology and innovation. Prior to joining the Dvara group, he worked with MicroSave Consulting India, TechnoServe India, Access Development Services, and BAIF. Mr. Vickram currently leads the value chain program in Odisha and is also a part of the core team members in the Business Development and Innovation at Dvara E-Registry.
Mr. Vickram initiated the talk by mapping the expectations from the students. He shared about his experience on internships, answered queries on internship and motivated the students to do good work. He then introduced the concept of FPOs and some of the major schemes introduced for the promotion of FPO. He further shared his working experience with DVARA and about the interventions that has been done by DVARA. Mr. Vickram then took the students through the app designed by them where he shared about geo-tagging of land holding, input tab, warehouse module, accounting module amongst others. He discussed about the KHET SCORE and its main objective in identifying potential farmers.
