Dehydration of Fruits and vegetables plant at Nashik, India – This facility was set up to demonstrate to farmers the advantages of using solar to process and store their produce. Till date, there is very little processing that happens in India and none of it is at the farm level. NRG strongly believes in the following:
i. Bringing newer and renewable technology closer to the people who can really benefit from it.
ii.Secondly, bringing technology to the lower end of the strata, who can possibly earn a decent living if they adopt these technologies.
In India, there is surplus of produce (usually fruits and vegetables) when there is harvesting season, and prices drop dramatically. During this time, the traders in this field force the farmers to sell their produce at alarmingly low prices. These traders often stop any off take from the fields, and the produce is left to rot in the fields itself, and in the end the farmer is forced to sell at whatever price is quoted by the trader. We have been a witness to tones of food rotting in the fields and farmers asking us to take however much we wanted for FREE! That is how pitiable the condition of these farmers is!! And that is when we at NRG decided that, in our own small way, we am going to try and do something for these farmers which could get them out of the clutches of these traders and help them earn a decent living!