Abhijit Sharma
Founder and Managing Director
The North East has the water, the climate and the demand. What it needs is the connective work, and someone willing to stay on the project until it runs.
Abhijit Sharma is the Founder and Managing Director of Living Roots Network Private Limited. His grounding is unusual for the development sector: more than three decades that began in senior roles at Unilever, Satyam and Lanco, carried him across Indian and international markets, and then moved fully into enterprise and impact work. That combination of corporate scale and hands on enterprise building is what Living Roots Network is built around, taking a project from a first resource assessment through financing and commissioning to the point where its produce is selling at a fair price.
Why Living Roots Network works the way it does
Most aquaculture projects in the region do not fail at the idea stage. They fail in the gap between a report and a running unit, where technology has to survive local conditions, approvals and finance have to be assembled, and someone has to answer for performance after commissioning. Living Roots Network was repositioned to close exactly that gap: consulting grounded in field practice, technology sourced globally and adapted for North East conditions, project management that carries past handover, and market connect that reaches a buyer who pays reliably. Under his direction the company works with State fisheries departments, development agencies, banks, producer organisations and private promoters across the eight States of the North East, in the rest of India, and internationally.
Finance and market access
What promoters and producer institutions value most is his command of the two things they most often lack. He knows how to structure a proposal a bank will back, how to navigate the mix of government schemes, credit and development finance open to small enterprises, and how to bring that support together so a first time venture can get off the ground. On the other side he opens routes to market, connecting enterprises to buyers, distribution and demand across India and, increasingly, in international markets.
A connected group of organisations
He is also the Founder and Chairman of the Global Association of MSMEs (GAMSME), an apex platform for micro, small and medium enterprises, and he leads a connected group of organisations addressing different parts of the enterprise journey. The School of Livelihood and Rural Development, which he founded in 2003, builds institutions and community capacity. Vistaar Agrotech drives enterprise creation and value addition. YesEarth Eco Consulting provides advisory, project design and sustainability expertise. Living Roots Network draws on all of them when a fisheries or aquaculture project needs more than technical advice.
Kartavya
Underneath the work sits the idea of kartavya, duty, which for him is a design rule: build enterprises in which economic value and responsibility to community and environment advance together, so that neither is sacrificed for the other. He is based in Bhopal, with a regional presence in Guwahati. Away from work he is a keen photographer with an interest in cinematic visual technique.