Enterpreneurship provides opportunities which help expand the horizon of an individual. It throws up new challeges before us that prompts us to explore new practices and things. It provides freedom to an individual to do the work of his choice. This viewpoint was hioghlighted by Lucky Anand (23), a BIT Sindri B Tech Metallurgical Engineering 7th semester student who launched a start up taking on the challeges posed by lockdown during the first phase of pandemic last year to supply fresh farm products, including vegetables and fruits to people at their door.

Talking to The Telegraph Online on Friday, Anand a native of Bokaro said, “Having left the college for our hometown during the first phase of lockdown we realised the difficulties faced by the residents of Bokaro where a majority of retired employees of the Bokaro Steel Limited live alone with no young members by their side.”

“Unlike commerial towns like Dhanbad, there are very few shops in each locality in Bokaro and they are primarily concentrated at centralised markets like city centre, while the vegetables are sold in weekly Hatia market,” elaborated Anand adding that due to limited hour permission for purchasing during lockdown, many elderly people could not come back to the market situated at far locations from their place.

“Realising the diffculties, I along with some of my childhood friends of Bokaro who are also B Tech students of BIT Mesra and NIT Jamshedur decided to launch an e-commerce startup combining technology with commerce making an app titled, Firstharvests, (available on playstore) through which orders can be placed and payments could be made,” said Anand.

“We had separate teams including one of two members for purchase of ordered products from farmlands, other of three members for delivery of products to the doorsteps of the customers, one technical team of three members for App development and maintenance and one of two members for the maintaining the accounts with regard to purchase and sell,” said Anand and added that they started this in May 2020 with 15 orders per day and gradually rose of over 100 orders in a day in December last year.

“As colleges started opening after normalisation, we also slowed down activity to concentrate on studies but we have plans to expand the activity of our entrepreneurship after completion of our course and will be moving to other places like Ranchi,” said Anand.