Farmer-turned-womanpreneur Ajita Nayak is a pathfinder of Navsari

SURAT: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade they say. But nobody imagined that the 56-year-old Ajita S Nayak, wife of a mango orchard owner, would make such sweet returns from this proverbial phrase. When fate sent back 20 crates of unripe mango to her one day, she did not get bitter. The gutsy lady waited till the mango ripened and started selling mango juice.The fruit of her labour indeed turned very sweet for the entire family.
Nayak didn’t let the lack of adequate classroom education stop her learning process. A self-taught food processor, she used her failure at the Board exams to step higher on and pass the life skill tests in flying colours. Till date, this womanpreneur has trained at least 20,000 people across the country in the field of food processing – especially of fruits. A task Nayak had taken up in 1994, when her husband failed to get good rates for his mango crop, she made a flourishing business of selling bottled mango juice by 2007 — and has never looked back.
In 2007 she decided to sell frozen and dehydrated fruit pulp, juice and mango concentrate from the small unit she had set up in Gandvea village of Navsari district some 15 km of Navsari at the cost of Rs 71 lakh — at a time when bank loans were unthinkable, especially for womenpreneurs. Slowly, the scene changed and when she went for further expansion in 2013, Nayak could make a sizeable investment of Rs 50 lakh to install state-of-the-art technology besides other infrastructure at the unit.
Today, Nayak deals in at least 14 different fruit products and runs a huge agro and food processing business. Her feat was feted on Mahila Kisan Diwas on October 15 , 2018, when she received the best performance award by Agriculture department of the central government. Her long list of awards also includes prestigious agriculture technology management agency’s value addition in farming award (The ATMA Technology Award), Best women agriculturist award to name a few.
How it all began
Talking to TOI of her learning curve, Nayak said, “I saw my husband struggling to get a good rate for quality mangoes from our orchard. I am a not only the wife of a farmer but a daughter of one as well. So, I wanted to do my bit to help. And when life threw at me 20 crates of unripe mango, my decision took a real shape. “The bottles of preserved juice sold at a price I quoted and four months later, I adopted this as my profession,” she reminisced.
In 2007 when Nayak could manage to gather enough money, she decided to go for agro-processing in the real sense and started selling organic frozen fruit pulp without adding any preservative, colour or flavour. Today her company — Deep Fresh Fruit Pulp — sells nearly 14 different fruit products With nearly Rs 70 lakh to Rs 1 crore turnover annually, Nayak and her two daughters-in-law, Bijal and Priti, market the products and also train other women across the country.