GQ India – July 2019

JULY 2019 — 65

ARAKU VALLEY

ANDHRA

PRADESH

M

anoj Kumar doesn’t have

OCD, but when he sees

things out of place – a

tilted photo frame, for

example – it bothers

him a bit. Part of it can

be explained by his passion for design and

aesthetics. Or it could be because of his

mathematical bent of mind, which means

he prefers symmetry and order. Besides

this, Kumar has a photographic memory

and the ability to analyse body language;

can speak and understand all four major

South Indian languages; spends almost every

week of the month in a different city; is an

Akira Kurosawa fan; and, if his past could be

extrapolated a little, could well have been an

Indian version of James Bond.

Only, you would have to replace the shaken

martini with a coffee, because Kumar loves the

brew. Even if he drinks only two cups a day –

occasionally three, if dinner involves fine wine

• he can talk about it for hours, and then some.
  The 50-year-old managing director of
  Naandi Foundation, which runs Araku
  Coffee, of which he is the co-founder and
  director, has a worthy story to tell. It’s a tale
  of a former banker, economist and counter-
  intelligence operative who went off into the
  Naxal-influenced forests of Andhra Pradesh
  to encourage resident adivasis to grow coffee
  that now retails across France. The tale of
  an organically grown crop, a cooperatively
  run business and a shared economy among
  thousands of people.
  Seated in his cosy cabin in Mahindra
  & Mahindra Ltd’s Mumbai office – Anand
  Mahindra is on the board of Naandi – Kumar
  does not give the impression of being a tough
  negotiator, but that of a gentle, persuasive
  mediator who meandered into the social
  sector. Having done stints with banks and

Naandi Foundation’s Manoj
Kumar is the man behind the
award-winning Araku Coffee

in microfinancing, he was wooed by Naandi

Foundation in 2000. He started working

on a few major projects, like overseeing

midday meals (in five states) and revitalising

irrigation schemes (in Andhra Pradesh) – the

latter allowing him to convince the people he

interacted with to take an enterprise instead

of a subsidy approach.

When Naandi became keen to set up social

entrepreneurships, the Araku Valley was a

name that came up often. “We always knew,

from day one, that we needed a legacy project,”

says Kumar. In Araku, amid scenic silver oak

trees and black pepper plants, he saw poverty

and a people whose lives were a far cry from

the urban idea of modern civilisation. The

locals were still hunters and foragers, dressed

in loincloths, with limited access to schools

and health services.

The Naandi team wanted to improve the

residents’ livelihoods and ultimately settled on

coffee, based on the locals’ recommendations.

What started with about a thousand farmers,

a core team of three to four people – including

agriculture and biodynamic expert David

Hogg – has transformed over a decade-and-a-

half into a project involving 1,00,000 adivasis

today. “David already knew about biodynamic

farming and I literally kidnapped him for

this,” says Kumar, laughing.

Through the years, there have been

continuous cultural negotiations with the

farmers. One such was building temporary

stone walls to separate farms and properties

for quality control because the locals had no

concept of, or need for, boundaries. “You have

to think of bringing out the profit enterprise

of the individual, which is the ethos of

capitalism, but not at the trade-off of socialist

principles of sharing,” explains the former

economist, who has a professorial style of

speaking, enunciating each syllable.

As cups of Araku’s signature blend arrive

at our table, Kumar talks about cherries, red

and ripened to perfection, which contain the

bean. He elaborates on the few factors that

go into a world-class coffee, such as the way

the estate is looked after. “In the rest of India,

coffee is an extra accessory in a rich man’s

asset portfolio. It’s not somebody’s livelihood.

It’s mass – even smaller estates are 40 to 50

acres. There is no one-acre estate like ours.”

O

n Araku’s farms, there are strict

processes: A farmer tends to each

plant, stem and cherry. The other

feature that matters is structuring

of the estate – how sunlight filters

through shade, which gives a higher yield and

makes a difference to the coffee’s acidity, how

the water is absorbed, etc. In large estates

harvested by machines, there would be two to

three harvests in a coffee season, which goes