Aniket Gharge IFE Store co-founder, built a zero-commission online marketplace that helps farmers across Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh sell directly to consumers, doubling their income without middlemen.
Aniket Gharge IFE Store; A Farmer’s Cry That Nobody Heard
Sachin Gore grows sugarcane and turmeric on 3.5 acres of land in Gove village, Maharashtra. For years, every kilogram of produce he grew passed through the hands of middlemen before it reached a consumer, with those middlemen pocketing the difference between what they paid him and what they charged the market. If he sold produce at Rs 90 per kilogram, it would appear on someone else’s shelf for Rs 120 to Rs 150. The profit from his own labor, his own land and his own crop consistently ended up in someone else’s pocket. (Aniket Gharge IFE Store)
The financial pressure became so overwhelming that a few years ago, Sachin attempted to take his own life. With a family of eight to support and income that never matched the effort he was putting into his land, the situation had reached a breaking point. His story is not unique. It is a version of the same story that millions of Indian farmers have lived quietly for decades, trapped in a farm-to-consumer supply chain that was never designed to work in their favor.
Today, Sachin sells jaggery and turmeric powder directly to customers across India through the Aniket Gharge IFE Store platform, paying nothing in commission and reaching buyers in states he could never have accessed on his own. He now receives orders for up to 50 kilograms of produce at a time. The difference in his life, he says, is real and significant.
Two Friends, One Shared Frustration
The Aniket Gharge IFE Store story begins not in a boardroom or a startup incubator but in the fields and villages of Maharashtra, where Aniket Gharge grew up in Vadagaon village in Satara district, the son of a farming family. After completing a degree in computer engineering, he spent a year working at a web development company in Pune before making a decision that his family found difficult to support: he left a stable tech career to start a YouTube channel dedicated to farmer stories.
That channel, which now has approximately 2.5 lakh subscribers, became Aniket’s window into a problem he had always sensed but could now see clearly documented across hundreds of conversations with farmers. The government promoted organic farming, awareness around clean and natural produce was growing among urban consumers, and yet there was no dedicated marketplace where farmers could sell organic and value-added products without depending on intermediaries. Farmers were growing excellent quality produce and then watching most of the financial reward disappear into a chain of middlemen they had no power to bypass.
The Aniket Gharge IFE Store idea grew directly from that gap. Aniket combined his technology background with his farming roots and teamed up with his college friend Jay Sidhpura, who took charge of product listings on the platform. In 2022, with minimal investment, the two launched the Indian Farmer Entrepreneurs Store, an online marketplace built entirely around one principle: farmers sell directly to consumers, and nobody takes a commission in between.
How the Platform Actually Works
The Aniket Gharge IFE Store model is deliberately simple, because complexity would defeat the purpose. Farmers discover the platform through Aniket’s YouTube channel and social media presence and reach out to him directly. He then visits their farms to inspect their products in person. Farmers are required to obtain FSSAI licenses for their products, after which they complete a registration process that involves sharing their details and product information. Once listed, their products go into Aniket’s warehouse in Satara and are dispatched to customers via courier as orders come in.
The pricing structure of the Aniket Gharge IFE Store reflects its core commitment to fairness. If a product costs Rs 100, it is listed at Rs 100. The only additional charge is Rs 10 for packaging. There is no platform commission, no hidden markup and no intermediary margin eating into what the farmer receives. To build consumer trust in the products, Aniket has also produced documentary-style videos covering the manufacturing and processing of each item available on the platform, giving buyers genuine transparency about what they are purchasing and where it comes from.
Doubling Income, Reaching New Markets
Within its first year of operation, the Aniket Gharge IFE Store is estimated to have nearly doubled the income of the farmers it works with. The platform has connected farmers in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh with customers across more than 15 Indian states, including Gujarat, Kerala, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Assam. For farmers who previously sold only within their immediate local area, this kind of geographic reach represents an entirely new economic reality.
The product range on the Aniket Gharge IFE Store has grown to cover over 25 categories, spanning jaggery candies, air fresheners, pickles, rose jam, millet products and spices, reflecting the diversity of what Indian farmers produce when they have the freedom and support to think beyond raw commodity sales. The platform has served approximately 340 customers so far, with Aniket actively working to expand reach further and bring more farmers onto the platform. This growth reflects a broader shift in how direct-to-consumer farming models are reshaping rural income in India.
Challenges Worth Pushing Through
Running the Aniket Gharge IFE Store has not been without friction. One recurring challenge is the reliability of courier partners, with products occasionally going undelivered due to carelessness at the logistics end, requiring multiple follow-up calls to ensure customers receive their orders on time. Building consumer trust in a new and unfamiliar platform is its own ongoing effort. And running the marketplace alongside a separate digital marketing business, which Aniket relies on for his own financial sustainability, means he is effectively managing two distinct operations simultaneously.
Then there is the challenge closest to home. Aniket’s own parents, themselves farmers, always hoped he would take his engineering degree into a stable city job in the IT sector. The path he chose instead, returning to farming communities and building a platform that earns him far less than a corporate career would have, is not one they immediately understood or encouraged.
“I believe I could have established a good career in the IT sector, where there would have been job security,” he acknowledges openly. “But I am fortunate to pursue my passion and be of some help to farmers at the same time.”
A Model Worth Scaling
What the Aniket Gharge IFE Store has demonstrated in a short period of time is something that policy discussions and agricultural reform debates have circled for years without fully resolving: that when farmers are given direct access to consumers and freed from the commission burden of intermediaries, their incomes can change meaningfully and quickly. The technology to build that bridge has existed for years. What was missing was someone willing to build it simply, run it honestly and do the unglamorous work of visiting farms, verifying products and following up on delayed courier deliveries.
Aniket and Jay have done exactly that, not with significant investment or institutional backing but with a shared conviction that the problem was real and the solution was within reach. For Sachin Gore and the other farmers whose products now travel from Maharashtra to Assam and Gujarat without a single rupee lost to a middleman, the Aniket Gharge IFE Store has already proven its worth. The question now is simply how far it can grow, and whether the model it has quietly pioneered inspires others to build similar bridges between India’s farmers and the consumers who are increasingly eager to support them directly.
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