The story of Rural Roots can be traced back to the Jagriti Rail Yatra 2014. Keshav Parthasarthy, one of our co-founders, happened to visit Deoria as a part of this train journey. The very next year, inspired by Keshav, his school friend and our other co-founder Shagun Setia followed suit. Both Keshav and Shagun were appalled to see the poverty and backwardness prevalent in the villages of Deoria. For instance, they discovered that in most villages of Deoria, average household income for a family of four is less than Rs 5,000 per month or Rs 1,250 per month per person (much less than World Bank's extreme poverty benchmark of $1 a day) Households have no personal toilets, and public toilets are few and virtually unusable; as a result streets are filled with faeces. Households have no water purifiers and drink water with high arsenic content; as a result many people suffer from water-borne diseases. Poverty is so extreme that it has become common for villagers to break public toilets for bricks required to construct shelters for themselves. The research as well their own experience in Deoria showed that the women are the worst affected segment of the society, owing primarily to their lack of participation in the workforce ( about 8% of the total labour force). This prompted Shagun and Keshav to set up Rural Roots as a food processing enterprise in March 2016. Since its inception, Rural Roots has growth from strength to strength. As of June 2017, we have managed to employ six women who produce different pickles at our processing site for an average salary of Rs 1,500 per month (for all women, this salary represents at least a 50% increase over their current household salaries). In addition, we also employ three local people to take care of the operations of the organisation. While we have started out with processing pickles, we shall be on the constant lookout for opportunities to innovate and diversify into other products to scale up our operations and impact.