Amitabha Sadangi—International Development Enterprises India (IDEI)

Headquarter in New Delhi
Year established: 2001
Area of Activity: Rural development, Agriculture

Since 1992, IDEI has developed and marketed affordable micro-irrigation technologies to marginal and small farmers of India. The irrigation technologies have vastly improved their agricultural productivity, strengthened their food security bases, integrated them into rural markets and lifted them out of poverty.

Recognizing the high co-relation between rural poverty and farmers’ lack of access to water, IDEI has identified micro irrigation solutions as a strategic entry point to poverty alleviation. It designs, develops and delivers small plot irrigation technologies that are commercially viable, one-fifth the cost of its competitors and scaled down to fit one-tenth of a hectare plots. The technologies are delivered through village market suppy chains to farmers who earn less than one dollar a day. They are popular enough to generate sales at an unsubsidized market price. For example, smallholder farm families in India have now purchased half a million IDEI Treadle Pumps, investing US$ 12.50 million of their own funds and earning a net income over US$ 189 million on their investment.

IDE International was founded in 1981 by Dr. Paul Polak. It launched in India in 1991 as a liaison office of the Canadian IDE. In 2001, IDE India (IDEI) became an independent Indian registered organization. As of March 2006, more than 4 million farmers (800,000 small farm families) had purchased small-plot irrigation products sold by IDEI and moved from subsistence farming to high-value crop production.

Amitabha Sadangi was born in a village in Orissa in a family that earned less than 20 cents a day. He witnessed wide-spread hunger and saw communities around him breaking up because men had to migrate in distress to seek construction labor. Influenced by these early experiences, he set off on the trajectory of developing income generating programs for the rural poor.

Amitabha left home at the age of 16 and paid for his education by selling newspapers, working as an accountant and selling beer bottles in exchange of clothes. He holds a Post Graduate Degree in Labor and Social Welfare and a degree in Law. His first job was with Churches Auxiliary for Social Action (CASA) and thereafter OXFAM, where he toured extensively, mapping the flood and drought-prone regions of Eastern India. This was the time when he developed and sharpened many of his ideas around market-based programs for poverty alleviation. “I saw farmers consuming their subsistence crop and throwing out the surplus. They had no access to market at all. They knew very little on how to sell their produce at a competitive rate,” Sadangi remembers.

In 1982, he joined IDE as the Deputy Director for India, when the organization launched in the country. He partnered with the then country director to launch the treadle pump program and later went on to serve as the first country director of IDE in Sri Lanka. On his return to IDE India in 2000, he set out to develop the organization into an autonomous outfit with strategic reach and impact throughout India. Sadangi is a founding member of IDE (India) and serves on its board. He has most recently received the Ashden Awards for technology innovations.