About

Prashant Mehra is a seasoned professional with over 28 years of experience in building digital platforms and products. He is currently serving as the Chief Digital Advisor at Rythu Sadhikara Samstha, where he is responsible for building digital public infrastructure for smallholder farmer agriculture, community-owned supply chains, and co-creating solutions in deep collaboration with communities. Prashant is also a co-founder of Platform Commons Foundation (PCF), which works closely with governments and community organizations towards deploying livelihood platforms and converting them into a federation of interconnected platforms. His primary focus is on creating a federation of public platforms as PCF's scaling strategy. Over 4 million farmers, waste-pickers, primary school students, volunteers, job seekers, employers, and buyers conduct their operations on the Commons Platform. Prashant aims to take this to population scale globally in the next 10 years. Prior to this, Prashant has worked extensively in the areas of strategy consulting, program management, and built large-scale software products & platforms. He headed Mindtree's Social Inclusion department and built public platforms. Earlier, he ran Mindtree's Business Technology Consulting operations in the UK & Europe and built high throughput IT systems in Travel and Finance. Prashant's professional goal is to help build socio-economic inclusion by championing business innovation targeted towards livelihood and poverty reduction. He aims to foster scalability in the social business ecosystem by building technology platforms and providing business consulting. He wants to help marginalized community members and micro-entrepreneurs operate and compete in mainstream economics, rather than on its fringes. Prashant holds a Bachelor of Technology degree from Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He has also founded Fractal Farms, an agri-business incubator that works with marginalized farmers and landless labor. Fractal Farms helps them build a balanced portfolio of cash and food crops, jumpstarts activities by providing funds, knowledge, market linkage, and operations support. The key value propositions are business model innovation, and collaborative/hands-on engagement with farmers.