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Journalism of Courage
The sky is not the limit for 27-year-old Dheeraj Borde, whose drones glide over the terrain spraying pesticides and making farming easier. But Borde himself never had things easy. The son of a cotton/soybean grower from the Wani taluka in the Yavatmal district in Maharashtra, Borde, did his schooling in Yavatmal. Then he juggled his engineering classes along with taking private classes to finance his hunger for coding.
Borde’s journey into the engineering world started when he was admitted to Pune’s MIT to pursue mechanical engineering. “However, I was interested in software and software engineering. My mathematics was good, and to finance my software language course, I took up teaching in classes for mathematics in various parts of Pune,” he said.
Juggling between classes and tuition was not easy, but he continued to do so to finance his software classes. Not deterred by the failure of his first two startups, he continued his studies. “I wanted to change my branch after the first year, but my family did not support my decision,” said Borde.
After completing his engineering, he was placed in a software company in Bengaluru, but his desire to be an entrepreneur made him defer for some months. “But family pressure made me take up the job, which turned out to be a turning point in my life,” he said.
For the next two years, including the Covid-19 year of 2020, he lived in Chennai and Bengaluru, where, other than work, he took up studies of blockchain to understand the mathematics behind this. “Those were days of staying at home, so I immersed myself in studies of blockchain and coding there,” he said.
In Bengaluru, Borde decided to chuck his high-paying job in a software company to enter an internship with a blockchain startup. “My parents were horrified, but I wanted to learn and do things on my own,” he said.
After some time, he got interested in drones, marking the start of his life’s second and most decisive period.
“Drones by then had started becoming popular. I invested in one, and when I came back to Yavatmal, I started using drones to spray insecticides and pesticides on crops like cotton, soyabean, etc,” he said.
The next four months were the most challenging time of his life. He did not receive any monetary help from his family, and it did not help that many ridiculed him for giving up a high-paying job to do what many felt was a “time pass”.
“I literally lived out of my car, slept in zilla parishad schools and community halls, and travelled places with my drone, but these months helped me understand the basics of the business,” he said.
While things were just touch and go, Mama Drone—as his company was called—also got two big breaks thanks to social media. “We were invited to cover an event in Phaltan, and videos of this went viral—we started work,” he said.
Mama Drone had fine-tuned its business. Instead of just offering services, it now covered the entire value chain of drones, from selling drones and spare parts to training people on how to use them. “Drones have become popular, but accessibility is still an issue. People don’t know where to get spare parts. We have managed to create the entire value chain, making life easier for drone operators,” he said.
At present, Mama Drone has two offices: one in Yavatmal and another in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar. “We are a one-stop shop for drones, offering sales, spare parts, and services,” he said.
The young engineer now aims to program the drones’ brains. “We want to be able to customise the drone in the right way. For a boy from Yavatmal whose future was once uncertain, this is really a big leap,” he said with a smile.
