Filmmaker, communications professional, researcher and now entrepreneur, Aakriti Srivastava fell in love with the Thar Desert during a field trip. After spending five years in western Rajasthan, she launched Bahula Naturals, where she brings agri-dairy products directly to the consumer. She works closely with 4,000 locals, including farmers and herders, which she has collectively termed Bahulaverse. They are also into organic farming.
Hailing from Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh), it all started when the 27-year-old heard about pastoralism, a form of animal husbandry.
“During my final year in college (2017), I decided that rural India will be my space. So, I travelled to slum areas of Delhi, UP fields, Karnataka but what caught my imagination was the desert of Rajasthan. It had extreme conditions where temperature can fluctuate from 0 to 50 plus degrees Celsius. I started delving deeper into how these communities are surviving on local culture and solutions. Their farming challenges, remoteness, limited resources, everyday climate extremities and resilience motivated me.”
Srivastava based herself in Bajju (100km from Bikaner) and started looking at back-end solutions to create an ecosystem and began her entrepreneurial journey.
She founded the brand in May 2022 with co-founders with Suraj Singh and Romal Singh. She says, “We brought together 4,000 agri-pastoralists (farmers and herders). Since geographies here are humongous and milk is perishable, we made 10 village-level milk processing centres. Now, we are aiming to become India’s first net-zero dairy. We are making ghee, cheese, processing and chilling milk, and grinding oil on renewable energy. We are the only producer of camel milk artisanal cheese in the country.”
Her next mission is to head to her home state, Uttar Pradesh, and replicate her experience in different geographies — Ladakh, North-Eastern sister states and other semi-arid and arid regions.