A New beginning ..
April 14th 2017, was when we put all our heads together and signed up for something was a paradigm shift at looking at problems of farmers & hearing out their issues. Helplines have come and gone, but picking up the crumbs of issues, and unravelling the core issue is something which we at KisanMitra have always look forward for & been trying to practice. A single distress case is just not one farmer helplessly reaching out to the helpline, but an indicator too of a wider epidemic out there.
As I sat down today after a “farmer’s meeting in Adilabad on the PinkBoll worm issue” & a few discussions with a few newly selected Field Coordinators, I was caught in a speck of gloom. I recollected me being nervous on how to pitch KisanMitra helpline to farmers in the meeting in Adilabad, so that they would see the depth of it and after working for 10 months if this is the state of me, then I felt there is a need for lot of introspection & lot of re-work on focussing resources.
I sat down and discussed with Sangameshwar our District Field Coordinator, Vikarabad tonight, and conveyed my current mood, and tried to open an explorative discussion with him. Discussions around current state of Vikarabad District where we have been operational for the past year came up. We went into deeper discussion on the huge list of pending cases of Crop Loss and how we have been planning to have a reasonable feedback to farmer. Then Sangameshwar explained his interactions for the past few weeks with various AO’s(Agriculture officers) & AEO’s(Agriculture extension officer’s) and how each call is making a difference. He explained how an AO was putting an effort to open up a conversation with a farmer and convincing him on how change of crops would move him away from such disastrous outcomes. How she was explaining him on using wilt resistant seed varieties for RedGram personally. The whole opening up of conversation is central & a step forward to Problem Solving & KisanMitra seems to have enabled this. But conversation between 2 parties is again very normal, and the complexity with which the current farmers issues are built in, necessarily requires various people from various domains to brainstorm, and that is clearly evident by the words of the current Collector of Adilabad, who previously was the collector of Vikarabad. She has constantly said at various forums that how immensely she has benefited from the discussion she has had around KisanMitra & all this knowledge she says she has majority gained in the past 1 year. That also shows on how if we believe in a particular thing, then the positive energy would drive us towards understanding the issues deeper and lead towards making a positive impact both on ourselves as well as your surrounding. We can see this in abundance with how Divya Devarajan(Adilabad Collector) has steered us.
As we prepare towards the launch of KisanMitra tomorrow in Adilabad District, the past 1 month has been about identifying people who could work with the above thought process as Counsellors & Field Level Coordinators. And its been definitely challenging to do the same. A field coordinator role is something that would require a lot more than a normal job, the person has to be self motivated, and should need to connect to the cause of the farmers, and should have a problem solving mindset as Collector Divya garu, always quotes. He would also need to be very patient and follow through the whole process of the lifecycle of a farmers problem. After a lot of thought we decided to try for a month with a few candidates, and have been asking all the other candidates who have been many, to go out into the field, make themselves understand the issues document them work towards resolving a few of them, and then come back in a month to discuss further, this we felt was the best way to recruit a field coordinator.
Identifying candidates for Counsellors role has also been an interesting task as we wanted to identify someone from Adilabad itself, those who could relate to the farmers even thoigh they ate remotely located and taking a call and also speak their diverse languages from Gondi of the Tribal farmers to Lambadi & Marathi of the Lambada farmers.
Sangameshwar and others who have worked in MV Foundation for majority part of their lives, always refer to about building a movement within farmer communities, which they did on child rights and which has been institutionalised later as 1098 Child Helpline & Ramoo (G.V.Ramanjaneyulu) has also been stressing on this since initial days. How to build a system which would make the officials to approach KisanMitra in the daily lives is also something we have been discussing and is a good technological as well as a psychological challenge worth giving your best shot for.
Technology has also been something we failed to totally utilise in our initial period of KisanMitra wisely. Inspite of lot of hardwork and research we felt that we were unable to identify a right partner to help us through the technological journey, and currently we are tagging along with a wonderful OpenSource Troope at ERPNext (Rushabh Mehta & Team) to live through our vision and are very happy on how things are shaping forward. OpenData is something we have been envisioning and we see how Kisan Mitra Helpline & OpenData go hand in hand to give a macro and a micropicture strengthening each other, and that is where we would be putting more energies too. Will try to break free of my normal chains I wind myself in of #nullexpressions, and start discussions with various #Opendata communities across like Datameet.
Finally when it comes to Impact, in my brief speech today at the farmers meeting, I stressed on the main motto of KisanMitra is to relieve the distress in Agriculture, and making it a formidable environment for farmers to share their thoughts and feelings & to decrease the farmer suicides to what ever extent possible. Even if we can manage to stop a few farmer suicides, we would consider it a good achievement and would try to work towards this as we take things forward.
