Vikas Birhma

  • Gramhal

  • Funded with support from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation

  • 2019 Global Fellow

Vikas Birhma
  • Gramhal

  • Funded with support from the Jerome L. Greene Foundation

  • 2019 Global Fellow

bold idea

Increase the income of smallholder farmers in India by providing them a bundle of post-harvest services including storage, credit, and access to the market through a digital platform.

organization overview

Gramhal helps smallholder farmers to break the cycle of debt by improving their cash flow and increasing their income. Its end-to-end post-harvest solution connects farmers with warehouses, banks, and buyers through a single digital platform. By ensuring the quality of the produce and fidelity of all financial transactions, Gramhal builds trust among stakeholders. Farmers can use its platform to make decisions about when to sell, whom to sell to, and at what price. Gramhal aspires to improve the lives of 600 million people in India who are dependent on agriculture.

Personal Bio

Vikas Birhma is the co-founder and chief executive officer at Gramhal. He is passionate about designing solutions that can improve the wellbeing of the Indian agricultural community. Vikas hails from a village in northern India and has lived experiences about the livelihood struggles of smallholder farmers. While in India, Vikas worked extensively on agricultural issues with both government and non-governmental organizations. He worked in the corporate social responsibility department of Gas Authority of India Limited, where he managed multi-million dollar projects on watershed management, agricultural supply chain, and skill building. Vikas is an Adrian Cheng Fellow at the Social Innovation and Change Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, where Gramhal was incubated in 2018. For his commitment to social justice and inner values, Vikas was named as a 2018 Dalai Lama Fellow at the University of Virginia. Vikas is an engineer by training and holds two masters degrees: one in social work from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and another in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

  • Issue Area ?

    A general program area that describes the focus of this Fellow’s organization during their Fellowship.

    Food and Agriculture

  • Organization/Fellow Location ?

    Our most recent information as to where the Fellow primarily resides.

    Cambridge, United States

  • Impact Location ?

    Countries or continents that were the primary focus of this Fellow’s work at the time of their Fellowship.

  • Organization Structure ?

    An organization can be structured as a nonprofit, for-profit, or hybrid (a structure that incorporates both nonprofit and for-profit elements).

    For-profit

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