Serving farmers, in the times of COVID-19
Technology and Innovation led startups are disrupting Indian agriculture, and are now even more becoming a part of daily life of the farmers, right from “Crop Production” to “Post Harvest”. The unprecedented emergence of COVID19 has disrupted every aspect of our lives. It’s been over 50 days since lockdown and technology led businesses have embraced the new norms of working from home, daily standups have converted into online meetings, logistics and supply chains facing tremendous shocks are now gearing up to restart operations again.
With the announcement of a huge stimulus package from the Government, message is pretty clear to get the economy up and running.
Like any other business Gramophone was also impacted badly for the first few days. We have been big believers of being closer to the farming ecosystem, lockdown was a shock to our operating structures. Strong cross functional work flow right from Tech team interacting with Agronomy or to a Last Mile Delivery operatives etc. has been key to our culture. Our onground staff and Gram Excellence Centre (Agri Advisory centre) are the lifeline for lakhs of farmers. Sudden disruption to this had put us on a halt for sometime but we were quick to shift to remote demand generation.
Backed by a strong Agronomic Intelligence Platform, our Agri Advisors were able to work from home and guide farmers. Gramophone warriors have been battling the COVID19 crisis on the ground by collaborating with government authorities, intra-state logistic movement with an aim to deliver the right product at the right time to the farmers. These efforts have helped many farmers to sow and harvest their crops during the lockdown.
Going PHYGITAL — The Winning Strategy
Gramophone has been at the centre of the digital revolution with more than 500,000 farmers on our platform, we are changing the way a farmer interacts with his farms. Gramophone App provides highly localised actionable insights, personalised to farmers needs generating millions of combinations based on variables like soil type, weather parameters, crop stages, etc. Using the app, a lot of farmers witness more than a 40 percent increase in their productivity and more than 20 percent reduction in the cost of production.
In our early days we realised that serving farmers would need a strategy that enables deeper penetration and faster TAT for delivery. Hence we took a micro-markets approach, which follows a hub and spoke model, for expansion. A distributed model and having a last mile physical presence helped us in building micro strategies by targeting areas where crops were growing. Despite operating at 1/10th of the usual size, we are seeing aggressive growth even in the the times of COVID-19.
With a Tech enabled approach to provide agricultural services on a realtime basis, we believe that the winning model for Bharat will be more localised, a blended use of Physical + Digital approach. After all, Bharat is all about relationships and a personal touch, agriculture being no different.
The relentless efforts of our Gramophone warriors to serve our farmers, which is in the DNA of the company has provided the energy to tide over these uncertain times.
The onground warriors of Gramophone have shown exemplary courage in overcoming the challenges presented by COVID19 and delivered on their promise to solve the problems of the Indian farmers. SAFETY of the employees and farmers is most important to us. We have been working with utmost care and our Business Continuity Task Force is rigorously monitoring and upgrading the safety norms.
We have seen several challenges in the Agri Input supply chain over the last few weeks. Sowing of food grains is of great importance in these times to keep the Food System of India up and running. Team Gramophone is working day and night to do our bit in reducing the crop productions risks of a farmer. Frontline workers across the World have inspired us to fight back and keep our spirits high in these testing times. Our teams worked together, better than ever before to deliver the promise of ‘Bringing Smile on Farmer’s Face’.
