How Info-services Can Help Farmers Up to 20% Increment in Income
There has been a mixed response to the recent announcement of loan waivers in the five states where Assembly Elections were held in December 2018; the dichotomy of addressing the crisis staring us in the face versus ignoring the RBI advisory of disturbance to the economy. But it is not the first time that the tax payers money has been used to waive off loans of a large majority population of India.
In an article published by The Logical Indian in 2017, India has a long history of loan waivers for farmers with the first ever waiver going as long back as 1990 which was a nation-wide farm loan waiver, then in 2008, in 2014, 2017 and of course recently in 2018. The effects of these waive offs were seen on the economy in the subsequent years each time.
Who Reaped The Benefits?
No, not the farmer. Did that legacy of waive –offs improve the life of the farmer? He continues to be poor, his life hard and his prospects dark. We are ignoring the elephant in the room, loan waive-off is a stop-gap arrangement that the government realizes but is not prepared to tackle. It is a multi-headed monster, a wide tapestry that is held together by several threads and all of them need to be wound together to arrive at a solution.
Why does the farmer borrow in the first place? To get the right quality of seeds, fertilizers, farming equipment, farming operations and marketing operations. So what goes wrong? One season, the seeds were not compatible with the soil. The next season the fertilizers he used in the previous season ate into the soil rendering it weak. The year after, the government dropped the commodity prices and the farmer ends up bearing the brunt of the misgoverned deficit.
For Want of Information
‘You give a poor man a fish and you feed him for a day. You teach him to fish and you give him an occupation that will feed him for a lifetime’ says an old Chinese proverb.
But are there enough studies, schools, advisory bodies that will guide the farmer with an analysis of his soil, the weather conditions conducive to ideal crop production, the nick-of-time weather updates and information about the right price deal? Simply, disaster management in our country has a lot wanting and hence information about all need-to-dos and perils is something that can save the farmer from the heartache leading to suicides, that sadly India leads in again.
A common man would check the weather for a week or month when he plans a holiday. Half the thrill of winters lies in beating the Fahrenheit but this dip could shroud the farmer interminably. Weather forecasting services are widely used in sectors like aviation, energy, retail, and media. Agriculture too uses these services but it’s sectionalized and marginally so. While the tech-savvy lender might use the AI to know the past record of a field or farmland and thereby calculates the risk of a particular farmer, the farmer himself is in the dark about his farm’s potential due to his orthodox farming mechanisms.
However, while the farmer still might not have made it to the farm school or the Youtube tutorial on the latest smartphone, SMSes are still reliable and many agrotech companies are employing the now 20-year-old short message services to send updates and alerts.
Technology For My Country Cousin
While a lot of this technology is being rampantly used internationally, India is still in its nascent stages for lack of enough agrotech firms in the private sector with a wholesome approach towards agriculture other than selling their wares to the industry. With the exception of some that are regionalizing the information and making it pertinent. Language is not just the challenge of a tourist but every Indian when he moves a few miles in a country that speaks 122 different languages and almost 1600 dialects.
Information Empowers the Farmer
The poor economic state of the farm community is the making of agrarian policies. Journalist P Sainath, stressed on this point. In a letter to the then Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh, he wrote “The farmers who have been committing suicide in tens of thousands…know it was policies, not the law courts, which drove them to take their lives” reports YourStory.
Information is key in any walk of life. Similarly, a farmer too could be better equipped to handle any crisis if informed timely about his privileges, latest technology, sustainable methods of farming and government subsidies available. If government subsidies are a grant for all farmers why is Maharashtra an outlier in terms of farmers’ suicides.
A quarter of a million Indian farmers have committed suicide in the last 16 years — an average of one suicide every 30 minutes. This when 50% of the population directly or indirectly earn their livelihood from the agricultural sector, this bread maker goes without bread.
But it is not a decided fate, not an indefinite misery, this has to change with the holistic cure that technology offers. Agrotech companies literally serve it on a platter for you today, customized intelligentsia about the crop to grow, how to grow, when to grow, when to harvest, where to sell and how to get the financial and business acumen on all of the above.
Save A Farmer: Initiative For The Farmers
It is essential that this tailor-made information on every minute aspect of agriculture is made available to every new, budding, aspiring and seasoned farmer. And not just them but every smallest link in the entire supply chain of this sector.
And every one of us can make it possible by aiding this development envisioned by many agri-tech companies today. And one such company, FarmGuide, enables the realization of this possibility in just 60 rupees with a campaign called ‘Save A farmer’. SAF ensures that the cost attached to these information services is not transferred to the grower who is much embroiled with the several worries of his daily activities.
SAF addresses the problems of information deficit through a sophisticated yet jargon-free push information mechanism and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system that has mapped 16000 customer scenarios in about 18 different languages.
While we spend a considerable time today sharing pertinent and impertinent information with all and sundry, FarmGuide can ensure that the farmer gets that one message which could be of paramount importance to his crop, his sustenance and his life.
