DIMAPUR, MAY 30 (MExN): A young Naga, Ruchinilo Kemp from Dimapur, is helping farmers in the remote villages of Udaipur, Rajasthan get access to advice and assistance from experts around the country.
Ruchinilo, who graduated from IIT Guwahati with a Masters in Development Studies in 2015, developed an app which provides them with access to expert information on their crops and cultivation.
Thanks to him, farmers from remote villages of Udaipur can now connect with professors in Udaipur’s Maharana Pratap Agriculture University and find a way to revive dying crops. Experts from the Krishi Vigyan Kendra can help a farmer deal with diseased crops by assessing the situation through photographs and videos. Farmers from Gura and Buriya can, through texts in their mother tongue, reach out to scholars at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in Delhi.
Speaking to thebetterindia.com, Ruchinilo said: “I was on the lookout for a programme that would not only help me create an impact, but would also help me explore myself. That’s when I learnt of the SBI Youth for India Fellowship through a senior,” recalls Ruchinilo.
Ruchinilo joined the Fellowship in August 2015, and began working with Seva Mandir, an NGO that deals with a variety of issues related to rural and tribal development.
“It was when I was out in the field that I realised one of the biggest problems farmers face is communication. Farmers, implementing agencies and NGOs and, on a larger scale, even agro-exporters, are all stakeholders. But farmers find it difficult to convey what is happening on the ground to others,” Ruchinilo explained.
He was also made aware of the problems the farmers were facing in cultivating hybrid vegetable seeds: “It is all still new to them, they haven’t been cultivating these seeds for long, and the problem is that these seeds – unlike regular seeds – are more prone to climate variations and water scarcity issues,” says Ruchinilo.
“They need a lot of support to cultivate the seeds at optimal level; they need guidance from the NGOs as well as technical help from external experts.”
Initially, Ruchinilo thought of buying and distributing mobile phones among the farmers but the issue of power relations between donors and beneficiaries kept him from pursuing the idea:
“If I buy phones to give them, they will have a sense of indebtedness to me. They will think of it as an act of charity and will not have a feeling of ownership, of entitlement about it,” he stated.
To ensure that the farmers developed a sense of ownership about the project and viewed him as a partner in their development, Ruchinilo urged the farmers to buy common smartphones or use existing phones for their respective communities.
This led him to expanding his project to include the development of a multi-purpose app.
I used Information Communication Technology (ICT) in the form of a mobile interface to develop an app for farmers where, if they are facing any problems, they can reach out to experts. They can also use the app to create reports about their farm and build a knowledge bank. This will prove to be very useful to the communities in the future,” he was quoted as saying.
He explained that the objective is to connect farmers with individuals who are experts in the agriculture sciences in order to promote knowledge sharing and sharing of best farming practices.
Using the app, farmers can reach out to five experts in different parts of the country. They can communicate using photographs, videos or even text messages in their mother tongue.
Queries and requests for help from the farmers are then picked up by the Cloud. These make their way to Ruchnilio and his team, who filter the messages and direct them to the appropriate experts.
The experts receive the messages in the form of email notifications. They are also able to access the location and other relevant information about the farmer on their ‘dashboards.’ Typically, these experts respond within a few short hours.
“It’s like an agricultural extension service,” Ruchnilo summed up the whole process.
The project was launched in October 2015 and, in eight months the app has met with resounding success. “In the months of January and February, we saw close to five or six queries from farmers a day,” Ruchinilo said.
Moreover, the entire initiative required no funds: “I have a background in programming and assembled the app myself, using open data sources,” Ruchinilo informed.
He said that the team’s biggest challenge was getting the farmers and the communities to “internalise the use of the app.” His team overcame this by holding training programmes, teaching them how to use the app, and also helped them realise the value and power of the Internet.
Ruchinilo said that the fellowship has provided him different opportunities, learnings and challenges. “It has been a humbling and invaluable experience to meet people from different communities and organisations. I think the entire experience has equipped me with the foresight to observe things maturely,” he was quoted as saying.
Ruchinilo is now looking to scale up his initiative to impact the lives of more farmers in the state.
