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During a session on blockchain and its implications, the panel had Mithilesh Desai, Jackfruit King, Mr. Ravi Joshi, Deputy CFO of BKT Tyres, Mr. Anupam Kashiv, CEO of Augmenter, and Dr. Jane Thomason, Editor of Web3 & Metaverse. Discussing blockchain, the moderator, Mr. Gaurav Somvanshi, said, “So, the beauty of, as I said, blockchain being a philosophy is that you get to see it live in action. It’s not just theory now. It’s not just white papers. It’s not just investment pitches. You are going to hear something—a live story from Mithilesh, who is known as the jackfruit king of India.”
‘We are well known as the Jackfruit King of India’: Panelist Mithilesh Desai
Jackfruit King of India, Mithilesh Desai, said, “First of all, I am very thankful to Maker Farmer, part of this program. Thankful to Kartikeya Sharma, sir. Basically, I am from Lanja, Ratnagiri district of Maharashtra. We are well known as the Jackfruit King of India. We are basically farmers who are working in the rural places and the small village of Maharashtra. I will tell you a little bit about our story.
“We are the first farmer who has done our collective work like a research station. There are about 128 varieties of jackfruit from all over the world. We have collected 86 from out of it,” he added.
Moreover, he said, “There is a term FSMA, the Food Security Modernization Act. If you have to supply it to the US, we will have to supply it when we get the traceability out of it, when the product or when of the single thing that we have made has the traceability. We can export the plants; we can export the food products, all over the world. That is the very importance of the blockchain in our supply chain.”
‘Blockchain Don’t Have Boundaries’, Says Panelist Ravi Joshi
Addressing what blockchains are, Ravi Joshi said, “Blockchains don’t have boundaries. So just to give you a background, we are a tire company. We manufacture close to 3600 kinds of tires. We export close to $1 billion in tires to almost 160 countries. Now, coming to the context of blockchain and how we used it, Europe is one of our prominent market The European Union came up with a regulation for deforestation, the European Union deforestation regulation, commonly known as UDA, wherein we were supposed to trace the rubber that is being used in our tires.”
He further said, “Blockchain handled it quite seamlessly. I also feel that blockchain is something sort of a hallmarking of data. When blockchain is there, there is no iota of doubt around the integrity of the data and how it is seamlessly integrated in the entire supply chain and the value chain. Taking a step next, if we talk about how it can help further, I just taking a clue from UDR. Every country is coming up with a different regulation.”
‘India Is Huge Inspiration For Me About Blockchain’, Says Panelist Dr Jane Thomason
Dr. Jane Thomason talks about blockchain in India. “India’s been a huge inspiration for me about blockchain, and one of the things was in 2017, a young man from Chhattisgarh, which honestly, I didn’t even know where that was, got in touch with me on LinkedIn and he said, Can you help me with blockchain? We’ve bought these mobile phones, and we want to give them to the tribal families so that we can get their government benefits.
“And I want to learn how to do it. And so we chatted over LinkedIn for a while, and I went. I have to go to Chattisgarh. I have to see the people with this ambition to connect those tribal families to the modern economy. And that was where my journey with India started. But at that time, blockchain is so much more even than the supply chain helping the poor farmers,” she added.
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