(left to right): Shamitha Keerthi, Adithya Dahagama, Kavya Vayyasi, Aniket Deshmukh, Samhita Shiledar, and John Monnat. PHOTO: courtesy Cheruvu
Big Ideas, Big Outcomes
An engineer takes her insights into data for sustainability to RMI and beyond
By Samhita Shiledar, associate in the India mobility program and Office of the Chief Scientist at Rocky Mountain Institute
We humans have been quite successful in our quest to uncover the hidden treasures of nature and improve quality of life. Our endeavors to increase the standard of living by keeping pace with the burgeoning demands of a population of 7 billion have moved us, in the words of Nobel prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen, into the Anthropocene epoch in which humans have a drastic effect on the Earth. However, my career, both at Rocky Mountain Institute and elsewhere, has shown the potential for technology to revolutionize our efforts to reestablish environmental sustainability and reduce the disastrous effects of the Anthropocene.
I grew up in India and moved to the United States a couple of years ago. Along with the cultural and lifestyle differences between these countries, I observed the impacts of climate change in both countries, giving rise to social, ecological, and health issues on various scales. Realizing the importance of a green economy for sustainable development to ensure the balance between highly efficient innovations and low environmental risks, I felt a strong need to study effective, inclusive, and sustainable development models. Thus, I decided to pursue a master’s degree in environmental sciences along with chemical engineering from the University of Michigan.
BIG DATA FOR SMALL FARMERS
Since I was a kid, I have been reading the heartbreaking stories of more than 300,000 suicides among farmers in India, which have been headlining the newspapers for two decades. The main reason behind these suicides was indebtedness due to farmland made barren by excessive fertilizer usage, lack of water reservoirs, and lack of access to advanced technologies. In order to contribute toward solving this issue, I, along with a few friends at the University of Michigan, started working on sustainable agriculture models as a part of our class projects and eventually cofounded our start-up: Cheruvu — Big Data for Small Farmers.
Imagine being a farmer who owns less than three acres of land. You have never conducted a soil test, you don’t know what tomorrow’s weather will look like, and your fertilizer use is simply based on your intuition. Sounds more like gambling than farming, doesn’t it? Yet 97 percent of the 263 million farmers in India currently work exactly this way, leading to incredible economic risk, putting families in peril. Indian farmers are not following scientifically proven farming practices and are in dire need of information and technological improvements to make agriculture a sustainable endeavor.
Cheruvu addresses these inefficiencies in the current agricultural system by providing farmers with precise, localized recommendations for their farms. Using big data solutions and machine learning, we are innovating models to increase profitability and reduce risks by tracking and integrating key variables such as weather, soil nutrients, farming practices, and satellite imagery. We provide farm-specific nutrient management guidance sheets to farmers, using local languages and farmer-friendly units, that walk a farmer through all the agricultural processes of an entire crop cycle. Our vision is to improve the economic, environmental, and social sustainability of farmers in India and, eventually, in other developing countries. Just the simple process of fertilizer optimization can increase yields by 33 to 66 percent in the region without increasing the financial burden on farmers.
“My career, both at RMI and elsewhere, has shown the potential for data to revolutionize our efforts to reestablish environmental sustainability and reduce the disastrous effects of the Anthropocene.”
Our social enterprise model is a hybrid of local community workforce empowerment and data-driven decision support, engaging rural women as field managers to provide a service that directly impacts small-farmer productivity and household social well-being. Our work is being recognized by the government of India and other private players in India, as well as globally. We are looking forward to exciting partnership opportunities with some of those who have recognized us. We recently won the People’s Choice award from National Geographic’s CHASING GENIUS challenge, wherein one project idea was selected among thousands of applications received from 60 countries concerning issues of global health, world hunger, and environmental sustainability.
We are currently working with around 4,000 farmers in 54 villages in India and aim to reach 15,000 by this growing season. Collecting geographically and temporally diverse data from these farmers will help us build robust machine learning algorithms to eventually inform better farming practices through crowd learning.
DATA SOLUTIONS FOR A MORE EFFICIENT MOBILITY SYSTEM
Data in the field of environmental sustainability has a wide spectrum of applications. Big data has been heralded as “the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity” by the McKinsey Global Institute and has swept into multiple components of operations in virtually every business.
“The opportunity exists now to leapfrog the traditional mobility paradigm, avoiding the ‘lock-in’ effects of a system defined by high costs, heavy pollution, and inefficiency.”
At RMI, our India mobility team is exploring the role of data in creating a more efficient mobility system enabled by sharing. Today, many Western nations are grappling with the effects of mobility systems dominated by privately owned internal combustion- engine vehicles and cities designed for cars, not people. Symptoms of the Western mobility model are already starting to manifest and could potentially worsen in India, even with a relatively low number of vehicles per capita — in India there are only 18 vehicles for every 1,000 people, while in the US there are about 800. As India continues to develop at a rapid pace, a catalyst is needed to create and invest in a shared, electric, and connected future in which mobility is accessible, safe, affordable, and clean. By sharing vehicles (the way users of rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft do) fewer vehicles overall are needed. By making the vehicles electric, mobility can rely on clean renewables as they increasingly supply the grid. And by connecting all modes of transport and every segment of the mobility system, the whole system can run more efficiently, affordably, and reliably.
The opportunity exists now to leapfrog the traditional mobility paradigm, avoiding the “lock-in” effects of a system defined by high costs, heavy pollution, and inefficiency. Data ubiquity and connectivity — elements of big data — are key components in realizing a shared and clean mobility system. Interoperable transit data can connect infrastructure, businesses, and users to expand the transportation market. This leads to higher asset utilization rates and load factors across vehicle segments like trains, buses, and cars, potentially alleviating costly traffic, local air pollution, and global climate change. India is off to a great start — the government has already set ambitious goals to deploy 6 million to 7 million electric vehicles by 2020 and 175 gigawatts of renewable energy by 2022, efforts that RMI is supporting and I am proud to be working on.
Crutzen said that the “human butchering” of nature started with the Anthropocene; at RMI, we are creating a clean, prosperous, and secure low carbon energy future to reverse it!
