New Delhi: After food, groceries, maids and cooks became available on online digital platforms for doorstep ‘deliveries’, it’s now time for coconut harvesting. Hello Nariyal, a tech platform, allows people to book well-trained coconut tree climbers through phones. It’s similar to booking a cab or ordering food online.
The platform was developed in collaboration with Kerala Startup Mission and other coconut development agencies. After a booking is done, a certified worker arrives in uniform with all the safety equipment and tools, ready to harvest coconuts efficiently and safely.
One of the videos of such an incident caught the attention of Anand Mahindra, chairman of the Mahindra Group. He highlighted how this simple idea reflects India’s growing ability to blend tradition with technology, bringing dignity and structure to even the most local forms of work.
“In Kerala, apparently, you can now call a coconut harvester the same way you book a cab. A uniformed professional arrives on a cycle, equipped, trained, and ready to work. We often speak about India’s services economy in terms of IT exports or global capability centres. But we’re digitising even our most traditional, hyper-local services,” wrote Anand Mahindra while sharing a video of a professional coconut harvester.
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‘AI can’t take his job’
Unlike traditional workers, the app-based coconut tree climbers are equipped with safety gear and professional uniforms. This is a big shift reflecting the formalisation of the local skill.
“There was another detail from this video that stayed with me. The young man who climbed those trees was from Chhattisgarh. When I began my career in our Group’s steel business, many of our associates working in our furnace and foundry shops had come from states like Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, travelling far from home in search of opportunity,” Mahindra added.
The initiative addresses a long-standing labour shortage in the sector, as younger generations in Kerala have increasingly moved away from labour-intensive agricultural work.
This is more respectable and sometimes even pays better than daily wage labour. Workers have also been trained to communicate professionally with customers.
Majhindra’s post has drawn all sorts of reactions from the people, with some even claiming AI will never be able to take over such jobs.
“AI can’t catch these jobs, His job will remain safe,” one X user wrote.
Some people also pointed out that this is not just digitisation, but an improvement in the dignity of work.
“When local services get structured like this, income becomes more predictable, and skills get recognised. That changes how people see these jobs. The real test now is scale. If this model spreads across states, it can quietly solve both employment and migration pressures,” wrote Anooshka Soham Bathwal, another X user.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)