Around the year 2000, a teenager in Bangalore helped police seize an illegal dancing bear. The next day, at the criminal court in Mayo Hall, the magistrate opened the Criminal Procedure Code and classified the bear as perishable goods, to be auctioned with the money sent to the treasury. The court didn’t even have a copy of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act. Someone had to call Maneka Gandhi, then a Union minister, to fax over the notification that banned bear dancing.
“The court said an animal is perishable goods. And what do you do with perishable goods? You auction them. I said, well, you can’t auction a bear.”
That teenager was Jayasimha Nuggehalli, now co-founder & COO of Global Food Partners (GFP), a Singapore company working to get Asia’s egg-laying hens out of cages. The magistrate had stumbled onto something Jayasimha would spend 26 years taking seriously. Animals get priced. What matters is who sets the price.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
Twenty-six years, one lesson
Jayasimha grew up in a Tamil Brahmin family one generation out of poverty, where the approved careers were doctor, engineer or Infosys. When a cousin joined IBM, his grandmother asked why not Infosys. He picked animal welfare at 17, after mailing a postcard to an address Maneka Gandhi read out on Doordarshan. He couldn’t get into vet school, so he studied law.
At PETA he worked undercover in slaughterhouses, factory farms and labs. Then he ran a pilot with the Council for Leather Exports on the cattle route from Pollachi market to the Coimbatore slaughterhouse, adding water troughs, ramps and stunning equipment. The animals were treated better. Leather buyers refused to pay more for the hides, so farmers and workers dropped the extra effort.
“If animal welfare is not economically viable, it’s never going to be viable.”
The law offered little backup. Most cruelty offences under the 1960 Act still carry a 50-rupee fine, and the 2017 livestock market rules he helped draft at the Animal Welfare Board were stayed by the courts. Jayasimha’s view is that certainty of enforcement matters more than the size of the penalty.
“A new commissioner enforces the helmet rule and suddenly every footpath is selling helmets. The minute he’s gone, the rule is gone.”
The math behind a cage-free egg
I went into this conversation as a fellow capitalist and put it to him: carrot instead of stick? He answered with a Bollywood title.
“It’s sab ka sapna money money, whether we like it or not. Money is an amazing power to do good, and somewhere along the way we villainized it.”
His model fits on a napkin. Call the cost of animal welfare X and the cost of ignoring it Y. Switching to cage-free might add 20 to 30% to a company’s egg bill. While X stays bigger than Y, nothing moves.
Y can change in a week. One internal email about caged eggs circulates at Google, employees ping the facilities manager on Slack, and Sodexo ends up renegotiating the account. Cage-free becomes the cheapest way to make the problem go away. When I suggested GFP worked like an insurer against that risk, Jayasimha sharpened it.
“An insurer only pays out once the risk actually happens. We come one step before that.”
The timing gave GFP its market. Hundreds of food companies pledged to go cage-free by 2025. Compassion in World Farming’s EggTrack found those reporting progress averaged 80% cage-free in Europe but only 57% in Asia-Pacific, where certified farms were scarce.
GFP’s fix borrows from renewable energy certificates. A company that can’t buy cage-free eggs in a given city buys Impact Incentives credits, and the money goes to audited cage-free farmers. In April 2026, Compass Group India bought around 4,000 credits, each covering 1,000 eggs, funding three Indian farms. It also opened a cage-free training centre near Bangalore with GFP as technical partner.
The farms have to work as businesses too. At Saudara Poultry Farm in Bali, GFP’s support kept laying rates near 88% at 50 weeks and got the farm Certified Humane in four months. In Indonesia, Jayasimha says more than 100 farms are transitioning. It started in 2019 with about $3.5 million over three years from Open Philanthropy.
An honest answer on product market fit
I pressed him several times on product market fit. He wouldn’t fake it.
“I can’t say with a high level of confidence that we have found it. I need to be truthful about that.”
His metric is birds out of cages per dollar, measured against what would’ve happened without GFP. He skips farms of 500 to 2,000 birds because the cost outweighs the benefit, and spends little on consumer awareness.
“Poll us as citizens and we answer one way. Watch us as consumers and we buy the other way. Very few people on earth vote and shop the same.”
India is his hardest market. Companies don’t buy eggs at scale, and “animal welfare” gets heard as “go vegetarian.” GFP is a for-profit partly because India treats foreign charity money with suspicion.
“We welcome FDI, and we’re the exact opposite on FCRA. If someone gives money without wanting money back, people assume the hidden motive must be bigger.”
So he’s going city by city, starting with food service companies in the metros. He’s vegan himself, and refuses to make that anyone else’s test.
“Making diet choice some sort of measure of doing good is wrong. But if we use animals for food, we have an obligation to give them a good life while they’re alive.”
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