Our Roots
Our journey – between the present and the past
Humble beginning, Mighty Aspirations
‘Kisano ke hith mein’ (किसानों के हित में) as its core philosophy, VNR traces its history back to 1960’s. Armed with an agriculture degree from Sam Higginbottom Institute of Agriculture, Technology and Sciences, Allahabad, Narayan Chawda, forayed into independent farming with extreme passion and progressive mindset. Lack of quality seed in market guided him to breeding and develop advance hybrid vegetable seed. In this journey of innovation and excellence, his son Vimal joined him then onwards VNR — the organisation started taking shape and eventually, streamlined with a professional management, as we see it now.
Bridging the gap
Being the first qualified farmer in his family created a significant impact on prevailing farming practices. Narayan Chawda had the knowledge and direction to help develop scientific farming techniques. After graduating he noticed that the theories taught to him in class versus what was actually being practiced needs to be aligned keeping in mind, the local climatic and soil conditions of Chhattisgarh. During his early farming days, he was not able to find the seed in market which had uniform germination. Seed that can give desired number of plants from a single packet, perform within its promised duration of early harvesting, have fruit with good taste and look appealing as well, were missing.
This desire to gain knowledge lead Narayan Chawda to read through many agriculture journals, magazines and research papers. Subsequently, he wrote letters to various agriculture research institutes and requested them to share seed samples and this led him to collect a huge range of seeds from various regions and farming communities. During these days in 1968, he recalled the reading of a book by Gregor Mendel (Father of Genetics) at library of Allahabad Agriculture Institute and decided to put his interest and academic knowledge of breeding into practice.
The first major breakthrough
After collecting samples of various seeds, his first attempt was at working on a combination of creeper variety of Sem—early prolific from Delhi and another a short plant type white flat bean variety—uttumochai—from the agriculture university of Tamilnadu. With these two seeds at his disposal, he continued to work on several generations of hybrid combinations and a series of plant selections over a period of seven years, spread out through various seasons. Determined that he was to bring about a change, after strenuous and dedicated research, he was able to strike a combination which was dwarf, prolific, green swollen pod, photo sensitive and thermo sensitive thus farmers could grow it throughout the year in tropical climatic conditions of Chhattisgarh. This variety of Sem – Dolichos was named as “Gomchi Green”—after his modest farm of 10 acres in the small village of Gomchi and was released in year 1976. Later, this variety of Sem due to its off-season fruiting got registered with National Bureau of Plant Genetic Research (NBPGR), New Delhi. While product life cycle of most of the seed variety is about four to five years, Gomchi Green has been commercially viable and popular, till date.
The journey had just begun
Following the success of Gomchi Green, Narayan Chawda had with his will power and perseverance to better the life of farmers, sown the seed of today’s fastest growing research oriented seed organization from a remote place in Chhattisgarh. While the VNR brand got conceptualised in 1985 and it was incorporated as a company, only in 2004 when Narayan Chawda’s son Vimal joined him, VNR’s strategic research focus has always been to work in the interest of farming community. Maximizing a farmer’s profitability by providing him advance, good quality and high yielding seed is strongly embedded in the roots of the organisation. The fact that Narayan Chawda came from a modest family of farmers and has seen difficult times because of shortcomings that the seeds had, he understood the needs of the farmer better than most.
A bitter-sweet start
When Vimal was farming in Berla, he planted a OP katahi variety of bitter gourd. While father and son were walking through the plantation, Vimal noticed that unlike every other bitter gourd plant which has both male and female flowers, one of the plants had just a female one. After discussing it among themselves, they decided to note detailed observations of this plant. The seeds of this plant were brought to research station, protected and multiplied. Over a period of time, they realised that this seed has high yield potential since it was free of a male flower. The cost of seed production in this case was also much lesser. While in present times, it is common to have bitter gourd seeds which are gynoecious (only female flower) based, but in 1994 it was extremely rare phenomenon. For most companies that need to produce hybrid seeds of bitter gourd, they have to cover each female flower with a paper bag and manually pollinate it in the morning. For VNR however, they already found the gynoecious line. So, they planted it in such a way that the male flower lines were in between the line of gynoecious seed and this made the hybridization process simpler. This resulted in lower cost of hybrid seed production – competing in the market on price front and on yield and every front was more doable. And so, while Vimal identified the flower, Narayan Chawda continued working on it to get the desired results. This discovery and research helped VNR released its path-breaking bitter gourd variety “VNR-28”.
While all of this was a breeding breakthrough, next came a major challenge with the produce was that bitter gourd VNR-28 fruit was small in size and traders were used to the bigger size fruit and weren’t ready to venture into something new. Narayan Chawda traveled places to try and convince people to try this variety. Finally, company started giving away seed packets directly to farmers at extremely cheaper rates and took the risk, all because of the trust they had in the seed. The risk paid off and when the produce came to retail market, it quickly became a favorite. This was the first commercial break through for VNR as an organization.
By this time, Narayan Chawda had started focusing completely on research.
Inspiration came from everywhere
Narayan Chawda’s determination to research and develop seeds that would help farmers pushed him in all directions. Second commercial break through was in the offing. During this time, Narayan Chawda came across an article written by Dr. J. S. Hundal, of Punjab Agriculture University, who had developed a genetic male sterile line in chilli. After writing to the university, they could procure a few seeds and then started producing hybrids based on this male sterile seed. After researching through several combinations, one of them, Chilli VNR-305 was an instant hit. The major benefit was drastic reduction in the cost of production. In male sterile line, you don’t have to undertake emasculation and remove the male flower. If the seeds are not male sterile then before flowering, the male part has to be pulled out and removed from each and every flower. This was not only labour intensive but any process error will lead to off-types. Both these advantages, error free operation and lesser labour input lead to huge savings in cost of production of hybrid seed.
Third commercial break through made the product portfolio stronger. Taking the lead from the journal published in 1995 by Indian Society of Vegetable Sciences, specifically a report about Rajendra Chamatkar, bottle gourd hybrid caught an attention. Post this article VNR called for seed samples of bottle gourd (lauki) from Rajendra Agriculture University at Bhagalpur near Patna. Several combinations were made and trials were conducted. Though Rajendra chamatkar-1 hybrid did not perform well in Chhattisgarh but it triggered and instigated Narayan Chawda to try combinations from his own repository of bottle gourd seeds. After many combinations among the available trial lines, VNR released its first bottle gourd hybrid, with the name Divya.
Spreading wings
After the company was incorporated in 2004, Vimal took the next four to five years to establish and build a strong base. At its core, Vimal always ensured that everything was done in a rightful way. He leveraged relationship with associates, build a team of experts hiring from reputed organisations. Making sure that every vertical was headed by the right kind of person, which was imperative to ensure that organizational roots are strong. The processes were standardised, infrastructure in terms of a research centers, bio-tech, pathology lab, quality lab and processing plants were set up. With constant progress and tapping into various opportunities, the company has huge grounds to cover and is successful at it.
Making a global impact
The company’s history is great example of passion and hard-work fused together to build a strong foundation that will stand the test of time. Research and Innovation coupled with the intention of accelerating the agricultural domain, the company has a lot to achieve and the end goal does not seem far. Company’s blue ocean strategy has many positive achievements like introduction of grafted vegetables and root stock seed. VNR with a clear vision aspires to make the Global impact.