Arpita Agro plans to go national

Neem-based products to be distributed all over India starting with north India

Arpita was the manufacturer of Nimyle household cleaner and other neem-based products.

According to Joydeep Majumdar, the managing director of Arpita Agro, "Neem is the best natural disinfectant available and with a large number of harmful chemicals now choking our ecological system, it is essential to switch to some natural ingredients".

Nim-it, the company's neem-based pesticide, was ideally suited for cultivation of high-skinned vegetables and fruits sold at the top end of the domestic market and overseas, he pointed out.

Farm produce protected with neem-based products would be completely free of banned chemical pesticides he pointed out.

"The scenario in Bengal is not isolated "" if people here are conscious so are the people in the rest of the country", Majumdar said.

Started in 1992 with the objective of providing viable alternative products (VAP) to chemical pesticides, insecticides and cleaners, Arpita Agro had gradually become a leading manufacturer of neem-based products in West Bengal. Operating from Calcutta, Arpita was at present selling its products in Bengal, Bihar, Jharkhand and Orissa through 180 distributors in the east.

In addition, 22 distributors were catering to retail outlets in some areas Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

Majumdar stated, "We are expanding to Delhi in a month or so and plan to have 300 distributors in North India who will cater to 30,000 outlets there".

In the next three years, he said the company would seek to place its products in at least 100,000 retail outlets all over India. He expected demand to be strong from new generation farming units in Punjab and other places in northern India which were expected to shift to new crops in response to big ticket investments planned by corporate India in the farming sector.

Majumdar said the farm sector appeared to be poised for major investments in sectors like irrigation which would lead to multiple cropping with focus on high-value exotic crops free of chemical residues and contaminants which typically entered the eco-system through pesticides and weedicides.

Neem-based products were ideal replacement for man-made chemicals, he said.

Arpita's Nimyle, a neem-based cleaner and disinfectant, was a replacement for normal phenol which was highly toxic and harmful to the environment, while Nim-it was a water-based pesticide, he added.

The company's plant was located in the southern Kolkata suburb of Bakrahat-Thakurpukur and the unit had adequate capacity to service the expanding distributor-retailer network, said Majumdar.