Women on Wings social enterprise partner since June 2023
“It started off with living in nature. Mom grew trees and organic food in our backyard. Growing up, the biggest joy was to be with trees and the forest,” says Ruchi Jain, founder of Taru Naturals.
Mom is Dr. Punam Jain, a practicing naturopath, writer, social worker, environment activist. She also develops her own herbal formulas. Taru Naturals was conceptualized to share knowledge of Mom’s naturopathy knowledge and to empower millions of small-scale farmers across India.
Taru means ‘Tree’ in Sanskrit, and small-scale farmers’ communities are in the network of Mother Nature Tree.
Taru Natural’s vision is to enable small-scale farmers to graduate to small business entrepreneurs. It works with small-scale farmers by encouraging climate resilient agriculture and providing organic farming training. It also sets up supply chains with market intelligence, provides clean tech value addition processing units, and ensures fair-trade market ready products for end consumers, sourced directly from small-scale farmers.
Founder Ruchi Jain is an ardent environmentalist who studied MSc Environment Change & Management from Oxford University, United Kingdom. Earlier in her career, after working with several NGOs, Ruchi worked with the Ministry of Renewable Energy in India for a rural electrification project funded by the World Bank between 2012 and 2014. During these stints, she realized there was a disconnect between the farmers and the market. This compelled Ruchi to quit her job in 2014 and start Taru Naturals in 2016.
In June 2023, Women on Wings and Taru Naturals entered a partnership which aims to co-create more employment opportunities for rural women.
