Ranchi
Dr Manisha Oraon has many avatars that she slips into effortlessly in her hectic daily life. She is a dental surgeon, an entrepreneur, an IIM faculty, a social worker, and a culture promoter — all rolled into one.
At 34, six years after she along with her pilot husband Abhishek set up ‘The Open Field’ farm-to-table eatery in Khunti, some 64 kilometres from State capital Ranchi, Manisha has already gone places.
Her eatery is close to the revered Deori Mandir on the Ranchi-Tata National Highway. The temple has now attained more fame due to cricket icon Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s regular visits there to pay his obeisance.
Manisha’s eatery is not an ordinary one. It promotes Agri and Eco tourism and specialises in serving the ‘Lost Cuisines of Jharkhand’. In fact, just a few weeks ago she showcased them at an international conference, organised by the Institute of Hotel Management, Ranchi.
“My journey as an entrepreneur is like a colourful adventure,” Manisha, who passed out from SRM University, Chennai, in 2013, tells The Indian Tribal.
She did not have any prior experience in the food business but her visits to remote villages during the third and fourth year of her dental education, her travels abroad and domestically from Ladakh to Assam besides her jobs at Health start-ups in Bangalore enabled her to understand the functioning and benefits of start-up projects and the associated nitty gritty of the farm sector.
“Coming back to my hometown and creating the sustainable community business ‘The Open Field’ thus happened,” she shares.
However, Manisha’s first shot at rose farming on her 20-acre farm land didn’t yield the desired results. Her eatery now sources much of the vegetables from her own farm besides the local haats.
“Travelling around, I noticed that people’s food choices are linked to their culture and identity. Urbanization, however, was making these traditions disappear. This bothered me. Then I saw the world talking about super-foods from nature, and as someone from a tribal community, I felt it was my job to share our unique food with everyone, and also find ways to preserve it. The Lost Cuisines of Jharkhand became my way of celebrating and preserving our special food heritage,” she elaborates.
“It’s not just about cooking, it’s about keeping our way of life alive, telling stories through each dish like Phutkal, Chakod Saag, bamboo chicken and also sharing the wonderful parts of our tribal culture with everyone,” she maintains.
While the tribal dental surgeon practices dentistry too, she also organizes workshops and customized events for women’s empowerment besides performing other roles in the capacity of general secretary of Jharkhand Indigenous and Tribal People for Action (JITPA) and the state president of Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad.
Her NGO Paroksha Foundation, set up in 2018, started working in association with JITPA to promote viable sources of livelihood for poor tribals based in far flung areas.
She represented the country at the UN-sponsored International Youth Forum held in Jakarta in 2019. Last year, the SRM University felicitated her with the Woman Achiever Award. And this year, the XLRI, Jamshedpur, bestowed upon her the Emerging Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award.
She is also a Faculty Mentor at IIM, Calcutta’s Innovation Park and an NREP Incubator in Bihar.
“Convincing the tribals in Jharkhand to share their land for their own good is not an easy task. But somehow we succeeded in persuading 11 farmers to efficiently utilise their 4.5-acre land. We are now giving direct empowerment to about 50 persons and 70 percent among them are women,” she lists out her work.
Manisha grew up from being a shy and introvert child during her early school days at JVM Shyamali in Ranchi to an outspoken woman full of determination and confidence.
“I didn’t have a lot of friends. I preferred staying at home and focusing on my studies, as I was an average student. But I was a keen observer, always curious about the world around me. What motivated me the most were my parents, both worked really hard in their jobs. Their dedication inspired me to take my studies seriously.
“Coming from a tribal (Manisha belongs to the Oraon tribe) background, getting a government job was the ultimate motive initially, and that was something my parents also wanted me to. I did not even know something called as business or even entrepreneurship at that time. So, my childhood was much simpler. However, things changed during my medical education and here I am before you,” she signs off.
