The Hindu Business Line : Tulasi Seeds gets best entrepreneur award

IN 1990, Mr Tulasi Ramachandra Prabhu of Guntur took to cotton cultivation, which promised good returns. In the first year, the hybrid he used did live up to the promise, and he made some money.

The next year, he brought more land under the cotton crop with the same seed, but this time it proved to be a disaster, with the yields dropping drastically (down from 20 quintals to 3 quintals per hectare) and he lost money. The reason was simple - defective seeds.

This prompted him to invest some money and get into the cotton seeds development and help the poor and small farmers, who were driven to suicides due to the crop failure induced by bad quality seeds. He floated Tulasi Seeds in 1992. In a span of just over a decade, the efforts have won him the Best Entrepreneur Award from the Union Ministry of Small Scale Industries.

After receiving the award from President, Mr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, on Friday, Mr Prabhu flew into Hyderabad to share his success story with newspersons. He said the seed business has grown within the Group and contributes nearly 30 per cent of the overall turnover of Rs 75 crore.

Tulasi Seeds has got the approval of the Genetic Engineering Assessment Council (GEAC) for developing transgenic Bt cotton. It hopes to bring two varieties - Sri Tulasi and Namaskar - to the market in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat, where it has been cleared for commercial sale from the kharif of 2006, Mr Prabhu said.

Tulasi Seeds is one of the several Indian companies which have taken the Bt gene technology from Monsanto to introduce the new varieties in the market.

The company has set up a Rs 2-crore biotech facility near Guntur. The laboratory undertakes research in genetic engineering for plants, tissue culture and has a DNA fingerprinting facility at present, said Dr P. Chandrasekhar, General Manager.

The Tulasi group is also into the manufacture of corrugated boxes for the last 28 years. It is among the top companies making these packaging items and a major client is the tobacco exports firms. However, the seeds business is a rapidly growing market and the company plans to diversify soon, Mr Prabhu said.

Tulasi Seeds also markets its own research hybrids as well as public bred hybrids in cotton, maize, sunflower, sorghum, pearl millet, chillies etc. It employs about 1,200 persons in its factory and R&D centres.

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