A Look at India’s Agricultural Supply Chains

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the fourth post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 15, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste in India. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Over the past week, we’ve learned quite a bit about how food gets from farmers’ fields all over India to the plates of the country’s 1.2 billion people. What struck us most is

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Police Corruption in Delhi

There’s quite a bit of security in Delhi. I can’t comment on its effectiveness, but it’s definitely all over the place. When you drive around the city, every couple kilometers or so you’ll come across a police checkpoint where a few officers stand and spot check vehicles for, presumably, anything suspicious. The checks can range from a look in the window to a more thorough search in the trunk or through any bags that are in the car. Once the sun goes down, though, the checkpoints seem to serve a different purpose. I’d always heard that India’s a pretty corrupt place, and got to see it first-hand last night. I was in a car with four other people, and we

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India’s Cold Storage Capacity

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the third post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 14, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste in India. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Cold storage facilities, essentially refrigerated warehouses, can reduce agricultural price volatility, helping to minimize food waste and increase income for various supply chain stakeholders. The benefits of cold storage are simple: most types of produce

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More on Azadpur Mandi

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the second post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 10, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Sam Kornstein are graduate students at the Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste in India. They will be sharing their project scope and some of their findings in this blog series. Soon after arriving in Delhi, we took a walk over to a local market and spoke with a man who runs the community produce stand. We asked him where he buys his fruits and vegetables. “I

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Delhi’s Azadpur Mandi Vegetable Market

Last week, my friend Paul and I explored Delhi’s Azadpur Mandi vegetable market. We were there gathering information for a food waste research project we’re working on, trying to understand where the food comes from, and what happens to it once it arrives. If you’re interested in learning more about our project, check out our recent blog posts on the MIT Public Service Center website. Azadpur is the largest wholesale vegetable market in all of Asia. It spans 80 acres in North Delhi, and receives over 700 truckloads of produce every day. We learned that the trucks come from all over India, with some trekking 72 hours from the south to drop off their shipments. It was chaotic. It was

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Battling Food Waste in India

Note: This blog post was originally published on the MIT Public Service Center website. It’s the first post in a blog series sharing findings from a research project I’m working on throughout the month of January. January 9, 2012 Paul Artiuch and Samuel Kornstein are graduate students at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Throughout the month of January they are in India researching market-oriented approaches to reducing agricultural food waste. Last fall, we each participated in the Development Ventures course in MIT’s Media Lab. The objective of the course was to identify ways to leverage for-profit business models to tackle some of the world’s most pressing international development challenges. As we both had an interest in finding ways to

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