Friends, readers and countrymen, let me tell you a story. A story of a young boy who lived far away in a small village of Bihar, called Mohammadpur. This young boy was the son of a poor farmer, he went to a government school, his books weren’t brand new and his school bag was a home-stitched polythene bag. When at home, our young boy and his family sat on jute sacks, they couldn’t afford couches. Life was an everyday struggle for this boy. In these circumstances, you won’t be surprised if I told you that, the young boy who is a grown up man today, sells vegetables in the big city of Patna. What is so special about this story, you ask? Why am I bothering all you good readers with this mundane story of every third Indian? It is because this subzeewala is no ordinary man. This is the story of Kaushlendra Kumar. Some four years back this man caught the nation’s eye when he decided to sell vegetables instead of taking up a high-end job, after passing out from the Indian Institute of Technology Ahmadabad. His aim was to organise the vegetable markets of Bihar. To create a process in which the farmers could directly sell their produce to the vendors. For someone who had spent most of his life in poverty, getting through a premier institute like IIM meant big job, good money and a gateway to a better life. So then, it was obvious that his family and other villagers would not take his decision of becoming a vegetable vendor very nicely. He informs us that when he told his parents about his plans a lot of drama ensued. “My mother cried for months, I was an outcast for a very long time,” he adds with a chuckle. But Kumar had his reasons. While he was in Gujarat (he did his graduation in agricultural engineering and post graduation both from Gujarat) a lot of his fellow students looked down upon him for being a ‘Bihari’. “I was a topper in my engineering college, I got the maximum number of gold medals one could, but at the end of the day I was just a Bihari,” he tells us. It was then that he decided that once he is done with his education, he will work towards building a brand Bihar. The only question was, how? After completing his education, he put his focus on the unorganised vegetable markets in Bihar. Belonging to a farmer’s family he was always aware of the exploitation that the farmer community suffered under the hands of the middlemen, the zamindars and the vendors. Therefore taking matters in his hands to improve the situation seemed like the inevitable to Kumar. Moreover, very early in his life, he had learnt the value of an established network. In the year 1989, when Kumar was a little boy, there were floods in Bihar. The flood water washed away the only rail track that connected Mohammadpur to the rest of Bihar. This event changed the lives of the farmers. Though his village was just 26km away from the city, the bad roads made the 30 minute trip a six hour journey. The farmers could not sell their produce in time, and suffered big losses. When the now Bihar Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar became the railways minister, he rebuilt the network, and life became much better. Kumar was a silent spectator of this change. In his mind he had understood the value of organisation. Geared with his Master’s degree and some `1.5 lakh, he started Samriddhii. From the beginning, he knew what he had to do; with the confidence that the IIM course had instilled with him, he knew he could do anything. After overcoming the first hurdle, which was convincing his family, he set out to jump the second one. He just had a paltry sum in his hand and a project like this one required huge investment. So he started frequenting the Punjab National Bank with the project file in his hand. They ignored his application for a long time, but after a while they got tired of seeing his face every day and finally decided to sanction his loan. Now that he had his initial investment of some `85 lakh, the third step and the most important one was to convince the farmers. He repeated the same process here. He went and met the farmers every day. “The farmers are naïve people, they start believing anyone who meets them regularly,” he says, and then pauses to quote Gandhi “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win”. And win he did. He began with a network of 300 farmers and today more 5,000 farmers work with him. The process is simple; the state has been divided into zones. Each zone has a collection centre where the vegetables collected from the farmers are cleaned and sent to the packaging and distribution centre in Patna. Here the vegetables are packaged, sealed, bar coded and finally sent to the vendors. “We sell branded vegetables, we don’t sell local vegetables,” says a proud Kumar. The first day of work, he barely managed to make a sale of `22, and his first annual turnover was merely 7Lac rupees. But today, his annual turnover exceeds `5 crore. Though he informs us that the profit rates are low, hardly one or two per cent, but more than the profit what they are doing is changing the social infrastructure of Bihar and changing the lives of the Biharis. Kaushlendra Kumar is an ordinary man with an extraordinary story. He speaks in broken English, is dismissive of his achievements, quotes Gandhi now and then and regrets letting his parents down. If you ask him of his plans for the rest of the country, he tells you in his cut-throat honest manner that he set out to build a brand Bihar and that’s what he will do all his life. There is a proverb in Hindi “akela chana bhad nahi phod sakta” (meaning: a lone gram can’t bust the oven), Kaushlendra Kumar proves it wrong. The world, or Bihar at least, has found its lone gram who has bust the oven will continue doing so till he can.