Born into an agricultural family, Rajasthan’s Shanker Meena went on to pursue a career in finance. However, he dropped out of college right after the completion of his first semester in 2012.
“Although I took the admission, back in my mind, I would always think about new business ideas. My heart belonged to farming. So, I wanted to explore a way to amalgamate farming and business,” says the MBA dropout.
For him, the decision to quit MBA was not easy. “People stressed that it was time for me to concentrate on shaping my career instead of running a business at this age,” he adds.
“To make it worse, I quit my college after the first semester mocking the villagers' expectations,” he shares.
Anyway, after dropping out of college, he tried his hands at cultivating mushrooms. “This product was new at that time and was popular in hotels. I knew that this business would boom in the future,” he says.
In 2015, Shanker went to the ICAR-Directorate of Mushroom Research in Solan to understand the nitty-gritty of cultivating mushrooms.
He sourced the mother culture from ICAR, Solan and set up a temporary jugaad (make-do lab) in the garage of his house to cultivate spawns on a trial basis.
He also managed to get a loan of Rs 9 lakh and worked on establishing a dedicated lab spread across an area of 9,000 sq ft.
In the lab, he introduced advanced pieces of machinery — like seed germination chambers, vertical autoclaves, and a laminar airflow cabinet — to provide a sterile working environment for better productivity.
“The reason why we became successful is because I always stressed on the quality of spawns that is usually compromised in this business,” he says.
A couple of years later, he launched his company ‘Jeevan Mushroom’ to sell spawns of a wide range of mushrooms — including button, oyster, lion’s mane, shiitake, and ganoderma.
Today, Shanker has established a huge market base in India and countries including Bhutan, Nepal, and the UAE. Currently, his monthly revenue stands at Rs 13 lakh.
For his work, Shanker was conferred the ‘Progressive & Innovative Farmer’ award by the Rajasthan government in 2019 and the ‘Innovative Agricultural Startup’ award by Startup India in 2020.