IIM-A grad launches subzi mandi on laptop

SURAT: Your daily aloo, baigan and bhindi will soon be just a click away. No more finding your way through the filth at your neighbourhood subzi bazaar and haggling for prices with rude vegetable vendors. An IIM-Ahmedabad graduate has brought the mandi right on your laptop.

City-based Akrosh Sharma, who passed out of the elite B-school in 2004, is all set to launch an online vegetable store after running a vegetable retail business for the last couple of years.

The website will create an online mandi where one can ���see��� the fresh vegetables, check prices and place orders. ���Apart from purchasing daily vegetables, one can gift fruits using the web service. We are launching the concept of gift-packing fruits and vegetables as a ���healthy gift��� option,��� says Sharma. Sharma feels it will be a hit, especially among working couples in the Hazira industrial zone who seldom get time to shop for fresh vegetables everyday.

���Once the order is placed, customers will get the vegetables at the time specified by them,��� adds Sharma, who grew up in Vadodara and joined IIM-A after getting an engineering degree from MS University. His stint at IIM-A landed him a lucrative job with a top MNC and was based in Surat. But Sharma, apprehensive of getting into a comfort zone, left his job to tread a different path and go on his own. He launched his vegetable and fruit business in 2007 in a 10 by 10 feet shop.

���I competed with the mandi and not the big stores. I created a subzi bazaar-like atmosphere in terms of product display that had well-behaved staff members dealing with customers, high sense of hygiene and no haggling,��� said Sharma. Currently, his ���mini mandi��� concept has crossed Rs 1 crore in annual turnover.

���New concepts like these will lead to improvement of the market where the customer will have better options. An institute like IIM-A can encourage entrepreneurship in a big way. We wish it is not only IIM grads but even other entrepreneurs should come forward with innovative concepts like this,��� says Vardan Kabra, who was Sharma���s classmate at IIM-A and had opted out of the placement process to launch his own school in Surat.