: She Quit Her IT Job To Help 2000 Women Earn 30% More Through Mushroom Farming #IndiaNEWS #Agriculture In 2013, Hiresha Verma, a native of Dehradun, watched the horrors of the Kedarnath flash floods

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She Quit Her IT Job To Help 2000 Women Earn 30% More Through Mushroom Farming #IndiaNEWS #Agriculture
In 2013, Hiresha Verma, a native of Dehradun, watched the horrors of the Kedarnath flash floods unfold on her television screen. The disaster, which was the result of a cloud burst, had left hundreds dead and thousands missing.
Hiresha, who was in Delhi at the time pursuing an IT career, was so moved by what she was seeing that like many others, she rushed to the affected areas in Uttarakhand with an NGO to provide aid and relief to the victims of the natural disaster.
“During my interactions with the women of the area, I realised that many of their husbands were now missing, never to return. These women were in a state of despair and had lost all their means of livelihood, support and hope,� she recalls in conversation with The Better India.
Hiresha, who is a graduate in chemistry and botany with a post-graduate in business management, decided to use her skills and knowledge for the betterment of these women. She began researching solutions to help these women come out of this unprecedented crisis.
Hiresha Verma with mushrooms at a unit.
“Mushroom farming was among the many ideas I thought about. Uttarakhand’s weather is suitable for growing the crop. Moreover, I had to find a concrete and viable solution for women that could sustain over a long period of time,� she says.
So Hiresh invested Rs 2,000 to begin experimenting with growing mushrooms at her home in Dehradun. “After a few successful trials, I underwent training at the Directorate of Mushroom Research in Himachal Pradesh. The same year, I established Hanzen International, a mushroom farming venture on 1. 5 acres of land by setting up ten huts with 500 bags in each of them,� she adds.
In 2013, Hiresha quit her job for good and moved to Dehradun to start mushroom farming. Since then, she has helped over 2,000 women in the region gain sustainable livelihood and increase their income by around 30%, she says.
Growing 1,000 kilos of mushrooms a day
As her company gained stable ground, many women approached her to seek knowledge and skills to pursue mushroom farming. “I provided training, spawns, and other material free of cost to them,� she says, adding that all the profits from the business went as investments in helping the women.
She adds that the practise continued for a year or more. Her success earned her the Uttarakhand State Award for mushroom farming in 2015.
Hiresha notes an initial challenge was that the compost for mushroom growing fell short. “The state government provided compost under subsidies only for three months a year. But the women wished to grow mushrooms throughout the year to ensure steady income. Hence, we established our compost processing unit on the land to provide the same,� she says adding, that it took eight unsuccessful attempts before the startup could devise the perfect compost mix.

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