Building more resilient agriculture in Northern India
This year, the Kellogg team placed second in the Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge with their pitch Sustainable Agri-Aqua Fund (SAIF). The blended finance investment vehicle aims at addressing groundwater depletion and farmer income volatility in Punjab, India.
However, beyond the pitch decks and financial modeling, the real value of this experience for the Kellogg MBA team comprised of 2025 graduates Apurva Patria, Karuna Chauhan, Deb Bhattacharjee and Shagun Sharma was in learning how to design for complexity and build something that balances trust, capital and climate outcomes in the real world.
Hear from two team members on how they tackled the challenges of designing a fund that balances public trust, capital and climate outcomes and how the school’s curriculum, faculty mentorship and global immersive learning experiences supported and shaped their journey.
Kellogg: Congratulations on placing second in this year’s challenge! Can you share more about the problem you were trying to solve with your investment proposal, and what do you think made your solution stand out in the eyes of the judges?
Shagun Sharma: What set us apart was our holistic model. We didn’t just underwrite micro-loans or insurance. We designed an ecosystem where farmers are helped across the process and make use of community power for collective benefit.
Our two-fold solution addressed worrying rates of groundwater depletion from over-irrigation while tackling the associated long-term economic risk farmers with a high reliance on crop income face. “Sustainable Agri-Aqua Fund” (SAIF) — our proposed blended-finance investment vehicle — would channel concessional capital into smallholder irrigation upgrades while mitigating risk through existing long-term government subsidies and community carbon credit pooling.
The judges appreciated our real high-risk problem identification, field research and concrete roadmap for scaling across Punjab’s districts.
Apurva Patria: For me, the problem wasn’t just technical; it was existential. Having worked in international development, I’d seen how policy often gets trapped in silos. What made SAIF different wasn’t just the financial structure but that we treated it as a systems solution: blending agronomy, behavior, capital access and trust. We didn’t lead with innovation for innovation’s sake — we stayed grounded in what was failing and why.
Kellogg: What was the most challenging part of developing a sustainable investment strategy, and how did your team navigate the balance between financial viability and social impact?
Shagun: One of the biggest hurdles was ensuring that the fund could deliver market-rate or near-market returns while still offering affordable financing to farmers. Traditional impact funds often accept lower financial returns in exchange for social good, but to unlock institutional capital at scale, we needed a model that satisfied both. To tackle this, we went deep in primary and secondary research to find out areas of potential revenue streams.
We wanted to make the solution as realistic and implementable as possible. It is easy to make spreadsheets but hard to implement if farmers don’t see interest or trust the process. So, we reached out to Punjab Agricultural University and other research organizations working in the area to understand farming practices, and also connected directly with small and medium farmers. This actually led us to the direction of using local micro-loan banks for our fund disbursals as they are trusted and have been in the community for decades.
Apurva: Another challenge was designing for trust. You can have a perfectly structured fund, but if the actors on the ground — the farmers, the lenders, the institutions — don’t trust the model or each other, it stalls. We kept asking: What would make this real for someone deciding whether or not to take a risk on a new system? That meant surfacing friction points like bureaucratic bottlenecks or maintenance gaps. That’s why we emphasized implementation partnerships as much as financial ones.
Kellogg: How did the social impact and sustainability curriculum or school resources help shape your approach to the challenge?
Apurva: One of the reasons I chose Kellogg was its social impact pathway, especially the opportunity to learn from Professor Megan Kashner. I took GIM: Impact and Sustainable Ventures in Chile and Peru with her in my first year, and it laid the groundwork for how I approach problems. During the course, we built foundational tools: root cause analysis, theory of change, stakeholder mapping and impact measurement. We then traveled to both countries to test those frameworks in practice, meeting with social enterprises, cooperatives, government agencies and corporates.
I saw the full range from social enterprises with polished models that never scaled to nonprofits with no decks but a deep community trust. Those tools became instrumental when I began developing SAIF’s problem statement with my team and that contrast stayed with me: ideas only work when they’re grounded in the realities of who they’re meant to serve.
I carried that lens into Early-Stage Impact Investing with Professor Tasha Seitz, which pushed me to think more critically about how capital flows both as a resource and a system with its own logic, incentives and constraints. It made me sharper about investor alignment: Who’s the right fit for a model like SAIF, and what do they need to see to come in with confidence?
It was Professor Dave Chen’s Sustainable Finance class that tied it all together. His emphasis on “ground-truthing” shaped how we approached every part of SAIF. We focused on understanding why existing mechanisms weren’t landing, why farmers weren’t shifting behavior despite subsidies and why uptake remained low even when capital was available. That kind of systems-friction thinking directly shaped our model.
Finally, Karuna, Deb, and I also took Strategic Challenges in Emerging Markets with Professor Ameet Morjaria, which helped us zoom out further. It challenged us to understand how institutions, informal structures and uneven power dynamics shape outcomes. It reminded me to ask: What does implementation look like when trust is fragile, incentives misaligned or authority contested? This perspective helped us think of SAIF not just as a fund but as an institutional intervention that could only work if it accounted for the complexity around it.
Kellogg: We encourage our students to lead with curiosity and openness. Were there moments when your team had differing perspectives or approaches? How did you navigate those differences to arrive at a stronger, shared solution?
Shagun: Absolutely! Early on, we were split between a “pure-play” microloan fund and a parametric insurance & fixed price marketplace pilot. Some of us — driven by our consulting backgrounds — favored the loan-only route for its straightforward cash flows. While others pushed for insurance to tackle climate risk more directly. To reconcile this, we organized rapid prototyping sprints. By turning debate into experimentation, we built consensus around the hybrid fund and then stuck strongly throughout as a team!
Apurva: One thing I valued about our team was how we made space for productive disagreement. We didn’t always agree and that was a strength. When we got stuck, we didn’t just push for consensus. We’d ask, “What’s the real assumption we’re holding here?” The curiosity let us revisit decisions without ego and evolve the model as we learned. It also made us more resilient as a team when pressure mounted.
Kellogg: What advice would you give to future Kellogg teams entering the challenge — especially when it comes to building strong collaboration and staying aligned under pressure?
Apurva: Focus less on finding something new or unique. We spent time upfront understanding the problem, the stakeholders and why past solutions had or hadn’t worked — like drip-irrigation pilots that failed due to low uptake or schemes where capital existed on paper but never reached the last mile due to low awareness.
It’s tempting to treat the challenge as a blank canvas or reverse-engineer a solution, but development work rarely starts from scratch. Public, private and nonprofit efforts are almost always already in motion and the real challenge is designing something that helps those pieces actually click.
For us, that meant staying radically open to let our ground research guide us. We didn’t start with a model and then look for a problem to fit it. Instead, we spent weeks mapping incentives, actors and gaps — both on paper and through conversations with farmers, academic experts, government officials, nonprofit leaders, carbon consultants and irrigation engineers. The goal was to design something that could actually work in practice.
Our questions shaped the model: Why weren’t farmers adopting micro-irrigation despite generous subsidies? Why was capital available on paper but missing on the ground? Where was trust breaking down? How could we incentivize the uptake? This kind of diagnostic work gave us a sharper sense of what SAIF needed to solve.
We also leaned into our differences as a team. Shagun led the landscape analysis and helped us pressure-test ideas with stakeholders. Deb brought the financial depth that made the structure viable. Karuna brought knowledge of agri-markets and policy in India. My focus was systems design, understanding how this could function across institutions with different mandates, bottlenecks and bandwidth. I also held the thread on how our impact logic translated into implementable pieces.
Our disagreements were where we made the most progress. Every time we got stuck, we treated it as a signal to revisit the root cause beyond the surface-level symptom. That habit saved us time and kept us honest. It’s also what made the model stronger.
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