“Every time I hulled 500 kg of paddy, I would be left with only 275 to 300 kg of rice. I lost both grain and income,” says Gopi, a small-scale organic farmer from Tamil Nadu. “The money was never enough to take care of my expenses and family.”

On his 10-acre farm, Gopi works with care and commitment. Yet the very step that should have turned his hard-earned harvest into food and income was instead draining value away. For every season’s crop, he spent days hauling his paddy to distant mills, only to return with far less rice than he expected. The wait meant fresh grain often sat for days, losing quality, while his earnings shrank.

His struggle is not his alone. Across rural India, countless farmers face the same invisible trap. Their labour in the fields is undermined at the mills, where the simple act of turning paddy into rice chips away at both quality and livelihood.

The hidden struggle of rice processing

For many farmers, the real challenge begins not in the fields but at the mills where paddy is converted into market-ready rice. Traditional diesel-powered mills dominate villages across India, but they are unsuitable for small-scale operations. Recovery rates are low, often yielding less than 300 kg of rice from every 500 kg of paddy processed.

The impact is severe as farmers lose volume, grain quality suffers, and profits fall. With little control over the process, many end up selling raw paddy at throwaway prices, sacrificing both income and independence.

This cycle traps farmers in frustration. Even when they grow organic or high-quality paddy, the poor recovery of existing mills means their effort does not translate into fair returns. For many, it feels like years of work amount to little more than survival.

Farmers take charge with a ‘bright’ solution

Breaking this cycle needed innovation tailored to the realities of smallholder farmers. This is where ‘SEMA Alto’ — short for ‘Solar-powered Efficient Machinery for Agriculture’ — steps in. Founded in 2017 in Bengaluru by co-founders Assad Jaffer and Dania Athar, the company was created to build clean energy and agri-tech solutions that lower costs, cut carbon emissions, and empower rural communities to keep more value from their produce.

Rather than retrofitting bulky diesel mills that were never suited to villages, SEMA reimagined the process entirely. The result was a decentralised, solar-compatible rice mill: compact, modular, affordable, and easy to maintain. Farmers could now process their paddy locally, on demand, instead of depending on distant and inefficient mills.

“Farmers have to travel long distances to access large mills and do not have full control over how or when their paddy is processed,” Assad explains. SEMA’s solution puts that power back in........

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