Featured Project · Avishkar 2024–25
A full-stack, direct-to-consumer marketplace connecting Indian farmers with customers — built across two technology generations, from PHP to MERN + React Native.
Indian farmers routinely lose income to layers of middlemen between the farm and the customer. Price discovery is poor, there's no direct buyer access, and almost nothing in the existing supply chain is built with the farmer's interests in mind. That gap — not a hypothetical one, but a real, well-documented inefficiency in Indian agriculture — is what KisanX set out to address.
KisanX is a direct-to-consumer marketplace that lets farmers list and sell produce straight to customers, without the markup and friction of intermediaries. I co-founded the project and worked as developer across both phases — architecture, API design, UI, mobile build, and deployment.
Stack: PHP · MySQL · HTML · CSS · JavaScript
The first version was a full-stack e-commerce platform: product listings, cart, wishlist, checkout, and order tracking, all backed by a PHP/MySQL server. I designed a responsive UI with animations, implemented authentication using password hashing and session management, and built the complete backend logic for cart operations, order processing, and inventory management. This phase was about proving the core idea worked before investing in a more complex architecture.
Stack: React Native (Expo) · Node.js · MongoDB · JWT Auth · Render · Android
Once the web version validated the concept, we rebuilt KisanX as a cross-platform mobile application using the MERN stack and React Native. The backend moved to Node.js and Express.js with MongoDB for flexible document storage, and we deployed it on Render for scalable, production-ready hosting. Authentication moved from sessions to JWT, with OTP verification added for an extra layer of trust during sign-up and login. I built RESTful APIs covering users, products, cart, orders, wishlist, and dashboard — and the result was a noticeably more scalable, better-performing, and visually modernised platform compared to the original web app.
The two phases reflect two different data models on purpose. Phase 1 used MySQL's relational structure for orders, users, and inventory — a sensible fit for a smaller, tightly-scoped e-commerce flow. Phase 2 moved to MongoDB once the mobile app needed more flexible, document-based schemas for products, dashboards, and evolving user data. On top of that, the Express.js REST API exposes clean endpoints for every core resource, and JWT tokens carry authentication state across the mobile client and backend without server-side session storage — a deliberate choice for a stateless, horizontally scalable API.
Security wasn't an afterthought. The mobile app uses JWT-based authentication for every protected route, paired with OTP verification at sign-up to confirm real phone numbers before an account becomes active. Passwords are hashed rather than stored in plain text, and the API validates and sanitises input on every write operation — lessons that came directly out of the Python for Cyber Security coursework and Deloitte Cybersecurity Job Simulation I completed alongside building this.
The Phase 2 backend is deployed on Render, giving KisanX a publicly reachable, production-grade API rather than something that only runs on a local machine. That single decision — going from "it works on my laptop" to "it works from anywhere" — was one of the more useful lessons of the whole project.
KisanX was selected for the Avishkar Inter-Collegiate Research Convention, organised by the University of Mumbai, in the Agriculture & Animal Husbandry category at the undergraduate level. We researched and proposed the platform as a technology-driven solution to supply chain inefficiencies in Indian agriculture, were selected out of multiple institutional entries, and presented a working prototype — covering both development phases — to academic evaluators.