Amit Mehra

Amit is the Founder and Managing Director of Reuters Market Light (RML). Inspired by the idea of a colleague, Amit started building RML in 2006, now a pioneering and award-winning business that sells a highly personalized information service over mobile phones to the farming community.  Farmers subscribing get decision-critical information across the crop cycle, irrespective of operators and handsets, in their local language, and as per their individual crop, markets and location preferences.

RML was launched as a business in late 2007 in India and has reached over a million farmers in 20,000 villages across 13 states in India with several hundred thousand farmers using a paid subscription. The financial return to farmers by using RML has ranged from $10 to $8000 besides the empowerment provided by this first-of-its-kind mobile information service.

RML’s innovation has been widely covered in leading media such as The Economist, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, International Herald Tribune, and Financial Times. It won the Financial Times-Just Means Social Innovation award for the Best Base of the Pyramid Strategy in 2010, and is a case study for business model innovation at London Business School, Cambridge University and the UNDP. RML has also featured in the path-breaking book of late Prof. C.K. Prahalad “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid” and in Nandan Nilekani’s influential book “Imagining India”.

Prior to RML, Amit worked in a variety of business development, strategy and operational roles in Thomson Reuters, Mitchell Madison Group, and a German government project. This covered the media industry, strategy consulting, and international trade development spanning parts of Asia, Europe and Africa.

Amit is a past member of Reuters Advisory Board for Corporate Responsibility, a founding member of Pratham, Germany, and a frequent guest speaker at various national and international forums. He studied at Shri Ram College of Commerce and Delhi School of Economics, and holds an MBA from London Business School.